Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa [1 ed.] 9780203939260

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Introduction
PART I The urban crowd and popular protest
1 Street violence and social imagination in late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (c.1500–1800)
2 Women and popular protest: women’s demonstrations in nineteenth-century Iran
PART II Poor people’s politics
3 Popular protest, the market and the state in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt
4 Workless revolutionaries: the unemployed movement in revolutionary Iran
5 Transforming the city from below: shantytown dwellers and the fight for electricity in Casablanca
PART III Peasants and nomads
6 Resisting the new state: the rural poor, land and modernity in Iran, 1921–1941
PART IV Marginals and outcasts
7 Probing the margins: Gypsies (Roma) in Ottoman society, c.1450–1600
8 Emancipated female slaves in Algiers: marriage, property and social advancement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
PART V European subalterns
9 “Making It” in pre-colonial Tunis: migration, work, and poverty in a Mediterranean port-city, c.1815–1870
10 Foreign workers in Egypt 1882–1914: subaltern or labour elite?
PART VI Subalterns and national movements
11 From national heroes to national villains: bandits, pirates and the formation of modern Greece
12 Seizing the initiative, regaining a voice: the Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada as a struggle of the marginalized
Index

Citation preview

SUBALTERNS AND SOCIAL PROTEST

The articles in this collection, by the intensity of their focus on the oppressed and the excluded, offer a challenge to the elitist nature of the history and historiography of the Middle East and North Africa. The collection is unique in its historical depth, ranging from the medieval period to the present, and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. It is the first to encompass both major social classes and sectors, the working class, the peasantry, the urban poor, women, and marginal groups such as gypsies and slaves, and their differing strategies: of survival, of negotiation, and of protest and resistance. Based on perspectives drawn from the work of the great European social historians, and especially inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the collection seeks to restore a sense of historical agency to subaltern classes in the region. Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow at the University of Northampton. Her most recent book is Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941, also published by Routledge.

SOAS/ROUTLEDGE STUDIES ON THE MIDDLE EAST Series Editors: Benjamin C. Fortna SOAS, University of London Ulrike Freitag Freie Universität Berlin, Germany This series features the latest disciplinary approaches to Middle Eastern Studies. It covers the Social Sciences and the Humanities in both the pre-modern and modern periods of the region. While primarily interested in publishing single-authored studies, the series is also open to edited volumes on innovative topics, as well as textbooks and reference works. 1. ISLAMIC NATIONHOOD AND COLONIAL INDONESIA The Umma below the winds Michael Francis Laffan 2. RUSSIAN-MUSLIM CONFRONTATION IN THE CAUCASUS Alternative visions of the conflict between Imam Shamil and the Russians, 1830–1859 Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and G.M. Hamburg 3. LATE OTTOMAN SOCIETY The intellectual legacy Edited by Elisabeth Özdalga 4. IRAQI ARAB NATIONALISM Authoritarian, totalitarian and pro-fascist inclinations, 1932–1941 Peter Wien

5. MEDIEVAL ARABIC HISTORIOGRAPHY Authors as actors Konrad Hirschler 6. CITIES IN THE PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC WORLD The urban impact of religion, state, and society Amira K. Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne 7. SUBALTERNS AND SOCIAL PROTEST History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa Edited by Stephanie Cronin

SUBALTERNS AND SOCIAL PROTEST History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa

Edited by Stephanie Cronin

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business First issued in paperback 2011 © 2008 Stephanie Cronin for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN13: 978–0–415–42355–7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–66582–7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93926–0 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on transliteration

viii xii xiv

Introduction

1

STEPHANIE CRONIN

PART I

The urban crowd and popular protest 1 Street violence and social imagination in late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (c.1500–1800)

23

25

JAMES GREHAN

2 Women and popular protest: women’s demonstrations in nineteenth-century Iran

50

VANESSA MARTIN

PART II

Poor people’s politics

67

3 Popular protest, the market and the state in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Egypt

69

JOHN CHALCRAFT

4 Workless revolutionaries: the unemployed movement in revolutionary Iran ASEF BAYAT

v

91

CONTENTS

5 Transforming the city from below: shantytown dwellers and the fight for electricity in Casablanca

116

LAMIA ZAKI

PART III

Peasants and nomads

139

6 Resisting the new state: the rural poor, land and modernity in Iran, 1921–1941

141

STEPHANIE CRONIN

PART IV

Marginals and outcasts

171

7 Probing the margins: Gypsies (Roma) in Ottoman society, c.1450–1600

173

FAIKA ÇELIK

8 Emancipated female slaves in Algiers: marriage, property and social advancement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

200

FATIHA LOUALICH

PART V

European subalterns

211

9 “Making It” in pre-colonial Tunis: migration, work, and poverty in a Mediterranean port-city, c.1815–1870

213

JULIA CLANCY-SMITH

10 Foreign workers in Egypt 1882–1914: subaltern or labour elite?

237

ANTHONY GORMAN

PART VI

Subalterns and national movements

261

11 From national heroes to national villains: bandits, pirates and the formation of modern Greece

263

GERASSIMOS KARABELIAS

vi

CONTENTS

12 Seizing the initiative, regaining a voice: the Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada as a struggle of the marginalized

284

ROGER HEACOCK

Index

313

vii

CONTRIBUTORS

Asef Bayat is Academic Director at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), and holds the ISIM Chair at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Before joining Leiden, he taught Sociology and Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. His interests range from Political Sociology, Urban Space and Politics, International Development to Social Movements and Contemporary Muslim Societies. His publications include Workers and Revolution in Iran (London, 1987), Work, Politics and Power (London and New York, 1991), Street Politics (New York, 1998), Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Faika Çelik is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. She has recently been awarded an SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) doctoral fellowship for her dissertation project on marginality and deviance in early modern Ottoman Istanbul. Her publications include ‘Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire’, Studies in Contemporary Islam 5, nos 1–2 (2003), pp. 161–82; and ‘Exploring Marginality in the Ottoman Empire: Gypsies or People of Malice (Ehl-i Fesad) as Viewed by the Ottomans’, European University Institute Working Papers no. 2004/39. John Chalcraft is Lecturer in the History and Politics of Empire/Imperialism Department of Government, LSE. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (State University of New York Press, 2004); ‘Labour in the Levant’, New Left Review 45 (May–June 2007), pp. 27–47; ‘Engaging the State: Peasants, Petitions, Justice and Rights on the Eve of Colonial Rule in Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 3 (2005), pp. 303–25; ‘Of Specters and Disciplined Commodities: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon’, Middle East Report 35, no. 3 (2005); ‘Pluralising Capital, Challenging Eurocentrism: Toward postMarxist Historiography’, Radical History Review 91, Winter (2005), pp. 13–39; ‘The End of the Guilds in Egypt: Restructuring Textiles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Crafts and Craftsmen viii

CONTRIBUTORS

in the Middle East. Edited by Faroqhi, S; Deguilhem, R. (I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 338–69; ‘The Cairo Cab Strike of 1907’, in Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire. Edited by Philipp, T; Hanssen, J; Weber, S. (Orient Institute, 2002), pp. 173–200; ‘The Coal-Heavers of Port Sa‘id: State Building and Worker protest, 1869–1914’, International Labour and Working Class History 60 (2001), pp. 110–24. Julia Clancy-Smith is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She published Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), co-edited and authored Introduction and a chapter in Domesticating the Empire: Gender, Race, & Family Life in the Dutch and French Empires (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998) as well as a special issue of (‘Writing French Colonial Histories’), French Historical Studies 27, no. 3, Summer (2004), pp. 497–505 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press) and edited North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World from the Almoravids to the Algerian War (London: Frank Cass Publications, 2001) [Special issue of the Journal of North African Studies 6 (2001): 5]. She is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘Migrations: Trans-Mediterranean Settlement in 19th-Century North Africa’, to be published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, CA and is working on another book devoted to colonial education for Muslim girls in French North Africa. In addition to these works, she is also the co-editor for The Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City in Text and Image (Los Angeles, CA and Seattle, WA: The Getty Research Institute and the University of Washington Press) to be published in 2009. Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow, University of Northampton. She is the author of The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910–1926 (I.B. Tauris, 1997) and Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State (RoutledgeCurzon, 2007), and the editor of The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); and Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). She is a member of the editorial boards of Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, a member of the advisory council of Qajar Studies, and assistant editor of Holy Land Studies. Her current work focuses on subaltern responses to modernity in Iran. She has recently published ‘The Tehran Crowd and the Rise of Riza Khan: Popular Protest, Disorder and Riot in Iran’, in the International Review of Social History (2005), and is completing a new book entitled Shahs, Soldiers and Subalterns: Contesting Power in the New Iran (Palgrave, forthcoming). Anthony Gorman has taught at universities in Australia, Egypt and London and is currently a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) as well as a number of articles on aspects of radical secular politics in Egypt, among them ‘Egypt’s Forgotten Communists: The Postwar Greek Left’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002), pp. 1–27 and ‘Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901)’, Middle Eastern Studies 41 (2005), pp. 303–20. His work on the history of the Middle Eastern prison appears, ‘Regulation, Reform and Resistance in the Middle Eastern Prison’, in Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Edited by F. Dikötter and I. Brown (London: Hurst, 2007), pp. 95–146. James Grehan is Assistant Professor of History at Portland State University. His research deals mainly with the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Middle East. He is the author of a study entitled Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in 18th-Century Damascus (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007). Roger Heacock is a Professor of History at the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine, where he has been teaching for the past two decades. He previously taught at the University of Paris 7, Geneva’s Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales and the American University in Cairo. His numerous publications deal with Mediterranean history, and the history of the Palestinian question in its international dimensions. He co-edited Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (with Jamal Nassar: New York) and his recent publications include ‘Le long parcours du tripolarisme politique en Palestine’ (Naqd, Algiers), ‘Palestinians: The Land and the Law, an Inverse Relationship’ (Journal of International Affairs, Columbia University) and ‘Le système international aux prises avec le colonialisme: les délibérations sur la Palestine dans la Commission des Mandats de la Société des Nations’, Leiden, The Netherlands. Gerassimos Karabelias is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Panteion University in Athens. His research interest concentrates on civil– military relations and the behaviour of armed groups in the Balkans. He has written three books in Greek and is the author of ‘Civil–military relations in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania during the post-Cold War period’, Mesogeios, Fall (2006); ‘State Modernization and Military Intervention in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece during the Early Twentieth Century: A Comparative Analysis of the 1908 and 1909 Coups d’État’, Oriente Moderno, Issue XXIIII, n.s. (LXXXV), 5 (2004); ‘A Brief Overview of the Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in Albania, Greece and Turkey during the Post-WWII Period,’ Journal of Political and Military Sociology 31, no. 1, Summer (2003); ‘The Role of the Hellenic Air-Force during the Second World War’, Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire 79, Fall (2001); ‘The Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in Postwar Turkey, 1980–1995’, Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 4, Fall (1999); ‘Twenty years

x

CONTRIBUTORS

of Civil–Military Relations in Post-Dictatorship Greece: Steps toward a Democratic Consolidation’, Mediterranean Quarterly 10, no. 2, Spring (1999). Fatiha Loualich is Reader in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, Department of History, University of Algiers. Her publications include ‘Femmes et pouvoir juridique à travers les actes des biens habous à Alger XVIIe- XVIIIe siècle,’ la Revue Cirta, no. spécial, Octobre 2000, Constantine, pp. 25–32; ‘Les affranchies à Alger, fins XVIIIe début XIXe siècle d’après les actes des Mahakim Shar’yya d’Alger’, in AHRFOS, no. 25 (2002), pp. 181–96; ‘Les esclaves noirs à Alger (Fin du XVIII[e]-début du XIX[e] siècle): De l’esclave à l’Affranchi, vers une relation d’allégeance’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Moyen Âge, 115, no. 1 (2003), pp. 513–22; ‘Alger au XVIIème siècle: le regard d’un captif porteur d’eau (Le sieur de Rocqueville)’, Biblio 17–149, Tübingen (2003), pp. 181–8; ‘Alger aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles: itinéraires de familles, itinéraires de biens,’ Revue d’histoire maghrébine, année 32, no. 117 (2005), pp. 83–98. Vanessa Martin is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written three books, Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of 1906 (I.B. Tauris 1989), Creating an Islamic State (I.B. Tauris 2000) and The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Qajar Iran (I.B. Tauris 2005). She has also edited two volumes, Women Religion and Culture in Iran (RoutledgeCurzon 2001), and Anglo Iranian Relations since 1800 (RoutledgeCurzon 2005). She is the Series Editor and Chair of the Publication Committee of the the British Institute of Persian Studies, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Royal Asiatic Society. Lamia Zaki has recently defended her PhD in political science at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. She taught for two years at the Institut d’Études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence (as an Attachée Temporaire d’Education et de Recherche) while finishing her dissertation on the political representations and practices of slum inhabitants in Casablanca. She currently has a post-graduate scholarship and is conducting fieldwork in Morocco on changes in the local political game. Her publications include ‘Deux candidats en campagne: formes de propagande et répertoires de légitimation politique au bidonville’ in Scènes et coulisses de l’élection au Maroc, législatives 2002, edited by Bennani-Chraïbi, M., Catusse, M., Santucci, J.-C., Paris, Karthala; Aix-en-Provence, IREMAM (2005), pp. 187–234; ‘L’action publique au bidonville: de l’éradication des kariens à l’accompagnement social des habitants,’ L’Année du Maghreb, 2005; and ‘L’écriture d’une thèse, entre contingences et nécessités’, Genèses, Décembre 2006.

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume is the product of two workshops organized as part of an Economic and Social Research Council project on “Popular Resistance to Elite Modernization in the Middle East: Iran 1921–1941.” I am grateful to Professor Robert Springborg for offering the hospitality of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS to the first workshop, held in January 2004, entitled “Iran and History from Below.” This workshop was also generously supported by the Iran Heritage Foundation. The second workshop, “Subalterns and Social Protest: Politics from Below in the Middle East and North Africa,” co-organized with Driss Maghraoui, was held as part of the Fifth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting in Florence in March 2004. My thanks go to Imco Brouwer and the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study at the European University Institute in Florence for hosting the workshop and for their assistance with the translation of two articles from their original French. I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the original project and I would especially like to thank Farhad Hakimzadeh and the Iran Heritage Foundation for providing the fellowship which allowed me the time to work on my own contribution to this collection and on its editing. “Street Violence and Social Imagination in Late Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus” by James Grehan was first published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35: 215–36 (2007) © Cambridge University Press, has been reproduced with permission. “Women and Popular Protest: Women’s Demonstrations in Nineteenth-Century Iran” by Vanessa Martin was first published in The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in 19th-century Persia (I.B. Tauris, 2005). “Workless Revolutionaries: The Unemployed Movement in Post-revolutionary Iran” by Asef Bayat was first published in the International Review of Social History, 42 (1997), pp.159–85. An earlier version of “Resisting the New State: The Rural Poor, Land and Modernity in Iran, 1921–1941” by Stephanie Cronin was published in The Journal of Peasant Studies. I am grateful to the editors of all three journals, Judith Tucker, editor of IJMES, Marcel van der Linden and Aad Blok, editors of IRSH, and Tom Brass, editor xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of JPS, and to Iradj Bagherzade of I.B. Tauris, for their kind permission to republish. Finally, I would like to thank Natalja Mortensen, my editor at Routledge, for all her help and hard work, and Peter Housego and Joanne Burman at the BP archive for finding the photograph which has served as the cover image for this book.

xiii

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

There has been no attempt to impose a uniform system of transliteration for the Arabic, Persian and Turkish names and terms employed in the contributions to this volume. Since spellings derived from non-Roman scripts are often compromises and may always be disputed, and no system is ever completely adequate, decisions about transliteration have been left to individual authors.

xiv

INTRODUCTION Stephanie Cronin

Historical scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa has conventionally focused on elites, political, religious, military or other, and in periods of social crisis, occasionally on counter-elites. The mentalities, agendas and ideological underpinnings of these elites have been relatively accessible to the historian, as they were historically both literate, generating voluminous documentary sources, and also powerful, able to generate a dominant discourse, framing and reinforcing their own versions of themselves ready-made for the scholar. In contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to the experience of non-elite, ‘subaltern’ groups in the region. This collection deliberately shifts the spotlight downwards, towards the oppressed and the marginal, in a challenge to the elitist nature of the historiography of the Middle East and North Africa and in an attempt to uncover ‘the politics of the people’. The collection situates itself within the broader effort to write ‘history from below’ as developed by pioneers such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson and as subsequently developed by scholars of the South Asian Subaltern Studies school.1 The collection seeks especially to restore a sense of the agency of subaltern social classes in Middle Eastern and North African history, stressing both their ability to initiate action independently of the elites, whether indigenous or foreign, which claimed hegemony over them, and also their crucial contribution to the dynamics of historical change. The chapters which follow, on diverse chronological periods, geographical areas and themes, attempt to reconstruct the experience of ‘subalterns’ in the Middle East and North Africa, examining both strategies of protest and resistance employed by major social categories and strategies of survival, including accommodation and collaboration, adopted by marginal groups. Many of the chapters focus particularly on key transitional periods, characterized by social, political and ideological crises, when society accelerated rapidly from rural to urban, from agricultural to industrial, from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’, and thus the collection begins to map the contours of popular responses to elite agendas, and to reconstruct the experiences of groups excluded from political power and marginal to the dominant ideological and cultural discourses.

1

STEPHANIE CRONIN

In general terms, the collection is distinguished from conventional social history by the fact that its focus is not merely on the poor, as objects of state policy, of the charity of the elite or as menacing embodiments of social chaos. Its overarching aim is, rather, to rescue the ordinary people of the Middle East and North Africa from E.P. Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ and to restore to them the dignity of consciousness, agency and independence.2 With Ranajit Guha the collection celebrates subalterns as the makers of their own history, but with Marx it acknowledges that they do so always in circumstances not of their own making.3 The collection encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, its interpretive pluralism drawing on the broad traditions established by the British Marxist historians and on the critiques of the Subaltern Studies group. It does not, however, seek to position itself in relation to the debates which have raged within and between these trends, a debate which has become increasingly bitter as some elements within Subaltern Studies have moved radically away from the group’s Gramscian origins into postmodernism.4 The question immediately arises: who is the ‘subaltern’? These chapters are predicated on the broad premise, derived from Ranajit Guha, that the term refers to a wide range of groups who possess a subordinate social, political, economic and ideological status.5 In this collection, the term is used most centrally to refer to numerically large, even preponderant, groups, such as the urban poor, the emerging working class, the peasantry, and to smaller but sociologically salient groups such as slum dwellers and the unemployed. However, the term also encompasses marginal and excluded groups whose activities may vividly illuminate social realities, such as bandits, gypsies and slaves. Furthermore in its conceptualization of the subaltern, the collection has been careful to integrate into its analysis an understanding of the gender dimensions of each of the social conflicts which it describes, and posits women both as active members of broader subaltern groups and as constituting a subaltern group on their own account. Indeed, women are very much present and visible in the chapters in the book: the respectable and ritualistic women’s demonstrations of nineteenth-century Iran; the socially ambitious emancipated female slaves of Algiers; the largely female gypsy ‘vice trades’ of singing, dancing and prostitution; the female captains of Greek pirate ships. Many of the chapters in this collection follow a tradition, deeply embedded in ‘history from below’, of focusing on episodes of social protest. It is indeed during such episodes that subaltern groups most often emerge, albeit temporarily and contingently, onto centre stage. Subalterns tend to appear in the written sources only when they withdraw their cooperation from elite projects and agendas. Otherwise they, and their perspective, tend to remain invisible or subsumed under the hegemony of more powerful social groups. Studies of crowd protest, riot and rebellion have always proved useful for an understanding of subaltern groups as they allow the often sudden appearance of a larger set of lower-class ideas and practices that might otherwise remain hidden to scholarly enquiry. As well as a focus on strategies of protest and resistance, the collection also encompasses an analysis of the strategies of survival characteristic of marginal 2

INTRODUCTION

groups shunned by wider society, including other subaltern elements. In this way the collection hopes to avoid any romanticization of the subaltern, incorporating a discussion of the ways in which the excluded might not only resist but sometimes manipulate, negotiate and collude with the authorities, even to the extent of acting as agents of political or social repression. Recent research has, for example, begun to interrogate the roles of ‘native’ troops in colonial armies, and of informers and collaborators. Driss Maghraoui has shown how Moroccan colonial soldiers were either represented in a colonial discourse which sought to appropriate them, or, later, excluded from a nationalist discourse which tried to silence them. Using oral history, he has begun to write them back into history, arguing that those poor Moroccans who joined the French colonial army were trying to renegotiate terms within the conditions of exploitation to which they were subjected as subalterns, their choices determined by local politics and the limited economic options available to them.6 Again, Ahmad Sa‘di has examined collaborators and informers among the Palestinians in Israel, looking not only at who collaborated, why and how, but also describing the strategies of public repentance used by ex-collaborators to reclaim an ‘honourable’ status in their communities after the end of their ‘careers’.7 In this collection Faika Çelik outlines the ways in which gypsies struggled to negotiate a route through the multiple disadvantages imposed on them by both elite and popular hostility. She looks, for example, at their role as Ottoman executioners, demonstrating how, by occupying this role, Ottoman gypsies confirmed and reinforced their negative image in the eyes of ordinary people, their pariah status persisting even after death when they were buried in a separate cemetery. Although taking as its central concern the collective, rather than the individual, strategies and options available to subalterns, the collection has deliberately excluded any treatment of formal political parties, even where these were clearly and overtly subaltern formations, and has also tried to avoid, as far as possible, a focus on what Gramsci has described as ‘organic intellectuals’.8 Also largely absent from the collection, although in this case due not to a deliberate decision but rather to the current state of research, is any sustained discussion of ways in which J.C. Scott’s notion of ‘offstage dissent’, the deployment of his famous list of weapons of the weak, ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage’, might be applicable to subalterns in the Middle East and North Africa.9 In general terms, the chapters below illustrate two key features of subaltern activism: first its generally defensive character, and second, its extraordinary sensitivity to shifts in the wider political context. Of all the chapters in this collection, only Roger Heacock’s account of the Palestinian intifada shows the camp-dwellers and villagers offering a transforming challenge to their own elite and to the Israeli occupation. Such revolutionary moments are exceptional in subaltern history. In fact, popular protests rarely offered a comprehensive defiance of, or aimed to transcend, the existing order, rather they tended to be provoked by what was perceived as the elite’s departure from socially sanctioned norms and values, a perception which might often be buttressed by reference to 3

STEPHANIE CRONIN

a mythologized past. Indeed, popular discourse often demanded a return to what was imagined as the status quo ante. The language of petitions, for example, typically suggests a strong sense on the part of both the urban and rural poor of natural justice, of the recognition of conditions for the exercise of legitimate authority and of their own rights. Such petitions habitually couched their appeals in the language of legitimacy and justice and protested against their violation by a usurping power.10 However, this perennial feature of the popular discourse of protest should not be interpreted to mean that the accompanying political activity was simply an essentially conservative struggle by subaltern groups to ‘keep things as they were.’ It was, rather, an effort by the relatively powerless to negotiate actively the terms of change while using the ideological tools available to them. In fact, the collection illustrates vividly that subaltern political activity in the Middle East and North Africa was far from timeless or unchanging, but rather responded to every change, whether subtle shift or major transformation, in the character of the dominant groups and of the power that they exercised. As a new European social history developed in the 1960s, its concerns and methods were imported into Middle Eastern and North African studies almost immediately, and work began to appear from the late 1960s onwards which bore clear traces of its influences. The first Middle Eastern ‘historians from below’ then trained another generation whose books and articles contributed to the further development of the field. In particular, the enormous success of women’s history and gender studies was of great significance in breaking down resistance to methodological and interpretive innovation.11 Yet, ‘history from below’ has not, so far, come to dominate the intellectual landscape of Middle Eastern studies as the British Marxist historians dominated their milieu, nor has it stimulated the controvery which has surrounded subaltern south Asian histories, its impact on its own broader field much weaker than both those traditions.12 How may the continuing relative marginalization of the ‘subaltern studies’ of the Middle East and North Africa be explained? To some extent, at least, it may be related to fundamental features of the region’s political development. The critique of nationalism in south Asia developed by the Subaltern Studies school was formed within the context of the actual success of the sub-continent’s local elites, especially the cadres of the nationalist movements themselves, in seizing and retaining hegemony within the independence movements and subsequently political and economic, and therefore ideological, power in the newly established independent states. Thus empowered, these elites were able to fashion a coherent version of the conflict with empire in which they claimed for themselves a leading role and a consequent overweening historical legitimacy. It was this version of the struggle for independence, as well as the older colonialist discourse, which the Subaltern Studies school contested. In the Middle East, the challenge to Western domination has remained incomplete and profoundly problematic, the very failure of elites in the region to realize the nationalist project itself impeding and distorting the emergence of a class-based analysis of the historical development

4

INTRODUCTION

of the region. Other impediments, arguably stronger in the case of the Middle East than other geographical regions, may also perhaps have played their part. Most important, perhaps, is the still burdensome legacy of orientalism, with its methodological privileging of prescriptive texts, especially religious texts, over the analysis of actual social realities.13 As well as the weight of politics and ideology on intellectual activity, there are, of course, real difficulties intrinsic to scholarship. Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have often cited the myriad difficulties surrounding the identification, location and utilization of source material as a major impediment to writing the history of non-elite groups in the region. The perspectives of subaltern groups are under-represented or even absent altogether from the sources and, themselves largely unlettered, they have left little archival material, while extant descriptions have usually reflected elite (and hostile) attitudes. Certainly the difficulties posed by methodological problems are real and significant and need to be addressed both theoretically and in practice.14 Yet recently powerful arguments have also been made which insist that such methodological problems conceal a political perspective hostile to certain kinds of subaltern history. Afsaneh Najmabadi, for example, has spoken of the ‘erasure of gender-marked historical events’ necessary for the construction of a male-centred version of the narrative of the constitutional revolution in Iran, while Donald Quataert has also argued that it is the will and desire to study the subaltern which is lacking, not the source material.15 The chapters in this volume, having adopted a premise which places and maintains the subaltern at the centre of attention, experiment with and adopt various solutions to the methodological problems of writing the history of nonelite, often non-literate groups in the Middle East and North Africa. As the pioneers of women’s history proved, against a chorus of doubt and opposition, the difficulties are not insuperable. Many of the authors here base their work on a re-reading, ‘against the grain’, of conventional archival sources. Others, acting on Eugen Weber’s observation that the illiterate are not in fact inarticulate, and that they can and do express themselves in different ways, adopt approaches from other disciplines, especially anthropology, and explore the use of material such as popular literature, folklore, song and oral history.16 The collection, with its chronological depth, also illustrates that not only the world of the modern subaltern figure, but also the lives of medieval subalterns may be reconstructed.17 Unfortunately, however, a major absence remains in the collection, reflecting a wider failure in Middle Eastern and North African ‘history from below’. There has, so far, been little success in using the sources that have proved so invaluable in European approaches: police, prison and especially legal, records, such records furnishing a wealth of data drawn from the most direct and most frequent points of contact between the official world and the world of the subaltern.18 The chapters in this volume fall into six parts. Part I looks at the urban crowd and its role in popular protest. The political or historical crowd was one of the

5

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first topics to grasp the attention of the new social historians and the chapter by James Grehan clearly acknowledges its debt to the seminal work on the European crowd produced by scholars such as George Rudé and E.P. Thompson. Although an interest in crowds, their social composition and their political role, communicated itself to Middle Eastern studies almost immediately, with Ervand Abrahamian’s ground-breaking work of the late 1960s, yet the study of the Middle Eastern crowd is still in its earliest stages.19 Despite the visibility of urban crowds in the crises which have periodically wracked the region, perhaps most spectacularly during the Iranian revolution of 1979, they have so far failed to attract a fraction of the scholarly attention devoted to their European counterparts. The social and political significance of the great urban centres of the Middle East and North Africa has long been recognized but they have conventionally been viewed exclusively as arenas of elite activity and contestation. Yet they were also sites of intense popular political activity, ranging from peaceful engagement and negotiation with the authorities to more determined and prolonged confrontations, to outright mass defiance emphasized by the use of different forms of violence. James Grehan offers an account, based on a critical re-reading of Damascene chronicles and biographical literature, of a variety of different types of crowd in Ottoman Damascus from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. His account shows the Damascene crowd to be extraordinarily sensitive to changes in the character and location of power in the city, and he looks specifically at the subtle shifts in forms of popular protest which took place in response to the transfer of power in the city from a Mamluk to an Ottoman elite. He uncovers a local culture of protest, situating his narrative of crowd action securely within a pre-existing tradition of legitimate protest, arguing that there was a recognized repertoire of actions with which both the people and the authorities were intimately acquainted and through which conflict between rulers and ruled could be choreographed. Discussing a bread riot which convulsed the city in July 1745, he comments on the ultimate unanimity of the participants, both the crowd and the governor, throughout the confusion and strife, the governor never disputing the right of the demonstrators to assemble in public. Both sides, Grehan concludes, ‘understood the other perfectly well’. Furthermore, not only was protest legitimate in itself, but it even served, paradoxically, to reinforce the legitimacy of the authorities against whom it was apparently directed. Asking why local accounts of popular protest often contained an element of ambivalence, displaying a fear of violence but stopping short of outright condemnation, Grehan argues that such protest, which ‘petitioned as much as it denounced, supplicated as much as it threatened’, was in fact an outlet that the local political culture allowed to desperate people who had reached breakingpoint and could find no other remedy for their grievances. Chapter 2 in this part turns to Iran, and focuses on the role of women in crowd protest. Vanessa Martin begins her account by noting that one of the features of the 1979 revolution which appeared most remarkable was that of the demonstrations by large groups of women. Noting that this was at the time 6

INTRODUCTION

almost universally assumed to be an entirely modern phenomenon, developing out of the mass demonstrations organized by the political left, the gender exclusivity resulting from the ascendancy of Islamist norms, she then argues that in fact these demonstrations belonged to a much older, and entirely indigenous tradition of independent female collective protest, dating back to at least the midnineteenth century and probably beyond. Martin looks at two types of crowd protest, bread riots by women alone, and bread or other types of riot in which there was collaboration between women and men. Agreeing with Grehan, Martin stresses the generally sanctioned legitimacy of the crowd’s actions, riots, even those by women alone, actually representing protests by the whole community. Although there now exists a substantial amount of work making visible the history of elite women, in Iran and across the Middle East, it is now becoming clear that women from poorer classes were also present and active in the political lives of their communities. Indeed, the picture which emerges rather contradicts assumptions about the leading role of elite women in emancipatory movements and in challenging female seclusion and passivity. As far as participation in public protests was concerned, the lower the social class, the more likely were women to be involved in large numbers. Where the protests were organized by a more ‘respectable’ leadership, of some social standing and with a concern to maintain prestige and respectability, women were discouraged from participating and were in fact largely or totally absent. Where the protests were more spontaneous and plebeian in character, for example, bread riots or anti-conscription riots, women were not only involved but sometimes played a central role. This conclusion bears out recent research into European crowd activity which has suggested that women were more likely to take part in crowd disputes where these were related to the economic interests of the domestic household, even if these apparently bread-andbutter disputes had obvious political implications.20 Furthermore, with little to lose in terms of status and social prestige, such poor women could act as a radicalizing force, readier than their male counterparts to resort to mockery and insult and even to violence, relying on the reluctance of the authorities to violate social codes by physically dispersing or arresting females. Recent research has shown, for example, how the wives of workers, during the 1929 strike in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, publicly exploited heavily gendered notions of honour and shame in order to maintain the solidarity of the strike. Again, in a Tehran bread riot in 1925, poor women invaded the Majlis session room and put on a theatrical parody of a parliamentary sitting, the rich symbolism of their reassertion of popular control over a site of almost sacred significance, and their ‘inversion’ of parliamentary procedure, providing fascinating material for the study of the subaltern cultural world.21 The Iranian case even suggests the existence of organized networks of women in the Tehran slums who would hire themselves out as required for the purpose of public protests. Both chapters on the urban crowd deal at some length with bread riots, within the seminal framework established by E.P. Thompson.22 As Grehan comments, few causes stirred the emotions of townspeople like the rising cost of bread and 7

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food riots are indeed far from a vanished historical phenomenon but rather still a common occurrence across the Middle East and North Africa, even rising in frequency as a result of new waves of privatization and financial reform.23 In Grehan’s and Martin’s accounts we can also hear clear echoes of E.P. Thompson’s moral economy, with Ottoman and Iranian crowds trying to defend customary practices, sometimes believed to have legal sanction, against the operations of the market. As in early modern England, so in Ottoman Damascus and Qajar Tehran, do we hear invocations of a ‘just price’, popular suspicions and rumours of plots to hoard grain and manipulate prices, anger against merchants, millers and bakers, and demands for official intervention and the energetic regulation of the grain trade. Part II looks at efforts by different subaltern groups to organize themselves into movements of self-protection against the various impositions of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism. This type of politics manifested itself not only in dramatic ‘crowd’ eruptions, but in carefully planned movements, sustained over time. John Chalcraft looks at the struggles of Egyptian workers and small cultivators to defend themselves against new forms of exploitation arising from the spread of market forces and the cash nexus, Asef Bayat examines the movements of the unemployed in post-revolutionary Tehran and Lamia Zaki describes the resistance of Casablancan slum-dwellers to a loss of access to a key resource through market ‘reforms’. All three studies highlight the extraordinary resourcefulness of subaltern groups and the imaginative modes of organization and struggle which they are able to devise to suit their circumstances and the stance of their antagonists. John Chalcraft takes Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as his context. During these decades Egypt saw rapid industrial growth and development in transportation, communications and urban utilities, with a concomitant growth in the numbers of the labouring poor and eventually the earliest emergence of a socially significant modern working class in the region. By 1914, for example, the Egyptian state railways alone employed 12,000 workers. This rapidly advancing process of proletarianization and the rise of modern political and industrial militancy coexisting alongside older forms of subaltern organization make Egypt in this period a rich source of case studies for working class history.24 Chalcraft draws together a number of episodes from settings usually thought of as radically diverse – town and country, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, working class as well as guild, to illustrate the methods by which various categories of the labouring poor, the coal-heavers of Port Said, the porters of Alexandria, the weighers and measurers of Cairo, and the small cultivators of Lower Egypt, tried to resist the new forms of social and economic exploitation that were being imposed upon them by both local elites and the colonial state. Chalcraft continues the conversation begun in Part I of the book with his discussion of the responses of the Egyptian labouring poor to the spread and intensification of market relations and their attempts to assert their own concept of a moral economy complete with appeals to the state and its regulations and codes. 8

INTRODUCTION

He describes the emergence of a range of collective movements of self-protection, which utilized methods including petitions, protests, strikes and attempts to seize electoral rights. The Egyptian poor objected to injustice, tyranny, treachery, captivity, slavery, loss of livelihood, land seizure, monopoly and low wages, among other things, while in their struggle for justice they asserted a variety of social and political rights. They appealed for the recognition of norms drawn from moral economy, guild custom or Ottoman codes, requested electoral rights, and demanded the redistribution of wealth. A particularly original feature of Chalcraft’s chapter is his analysis of the significance for subaltern politics in both town and countryside of elections. In a cogent analysis which mirrors his emphasis on the subaltern ability to respond to changing conditions, Chalcraft develops a sharp critique of modernization theory which credits elites with the sole authorship of progressive change. Asserting that positive change might and indeed did come from below, Chalcraft shows how concentrations of power associated with the state, the economy and the empire typically worked not to extend representative government and democracy but rather to oppose and repress subaltern social and political rights. In his inclusion of both workers and peasants in a single analytical framework, Chalcraft points to ways in which a fusion might be effected, in the context of an urbanizing and industrializing economy and society, between categories that are usually kept quite distinct. After all, the dockers, coal-heavers and other unskilled workers along the Suez Canal were themselves drawn from the ranks of the landless peasantry, their journey from peasant to worker profoundly affecting both the mentalite of the new working class and the rural communities they left behind.25 Asef Bayat highlights an extremely unusual case, the sustained and organized struggle for jobs and protection which appeared among the unemployed in postrevolutionary Iran. He points out that, in developing countries, such movements by the unemployed are extremely rare, despite high rates of open and concealed joblessness, family kinship, patron–client relations and especially the informal sector providing essential mechanisms of protection and survival. Furthermore the difficulties of organization for the unemployed (even in the first world), generally prevent the emergence of sustained protest movements. Bayat chronicles the story of the unemployed movement in Iran immediately following the revolution of 1979, examining its genesis and organization, and its tactics of collective protest, including demonstrations, sit-ins, sometimes combined with hunger strikes, and the issuing of resolutions. He relates its emergence to the unfolding political conjuncture, the key features of which were the consolidation of the Islamic republic and the rise of a revolutionary ideology among the jobless. Lamia Zaki returns to Chalcraft’s general theme, the efforts made by the newly urbanized and proletarianized poor to defend themselves against the spread of market forces, in her discussion of the collective determination of Casablanca shantytown dwellers to negotiate terms for their access to electricity. She shows how an aggressive unleashing of market forces disrupted the existing social balance between the shantytown dwellers and the wider society. The shantytowns 9

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had been accustomed to appropriating illegally the electricity they needed, relying on a tacit understanding with the State and the former public company whereby the State had come to accept the hijacking of electricity, partly to preserve social peace but also to keep the shantytown dwellers out of the city proper. The newly privatized company however, motivated purely by financial considerations, embarked on a confrontation with the shantytown dwellers. The latter, after a protracted struggle, a crucial element of which was their elaboration of a justificatory discourse of human rights, succeeded in exploiting the differing goals of the State and the company to retain and even expand their access to cheap electricity. Part III turns to the rural poor. In general, the rise of peasant studies as a discrete field of research in the 1970s found comparatively little response among historians of the Middle East and North Africa.26 Since the region appeared to lack the large-scale peasant risings characteristic of countries such as China, or even the politically significant peasant movements of Latin America, historians of the Middle East and North Africa tended to dismiss the countryside as uninteresting, its people passive, apolitical and socially conservative. Yet, even for the British Marxist historians, who worked in and wrote about the country which saw the first triumph of capitalism and the earliest formation of an industrial working class, the fate of the rural poor was a subject of immense significance.27 Again, in the foundational works of Subaltern Studies, the peasant rebel was a key figure. Nonetheless, although the great majority of the people of the Middle East and North Africa have, until recently, lived in the countryside, their consciousness and historical agency has been little investigated. If historians of the Middle East have too often been content to share Marx’s characterization of peasants as so many potatoes in sacks, their view of tribal nomads has typically been actively hostile. The ordinary nomads have frequently been depicted as mere instruments of their khans, and all layers of the tribal pyramid as backward and reactionary, any resistance from them to government policy merely a symptom of an eternal and unchanging conflict between tribal chaos and state-imposed order. These conventions are challenged by Stephanie Cronin in her account of the experience of the rural poor in early Pahlavi Iran, experience which was framed by the project of the new regime established after the coup d’état of 1921. Cronin relates changes in the consciousness and modes of action of the rural poor to changes in the relations of production in the countryside, particularly emphasizing the impact of the penetration of capitalism, of the proletarianization of large numbers of the rural poor, and of the ideology of the nationalist elite itself. Riza Khan, later Riza Shah, deploying slogans drawn from a nationalist and populist discourse, implemented policies which nourished and entrenched capitalist economic relations in Iran. Posing as an iconoclast and as incorrigibly hostile to the old Qajar elite (the Qajar dynasty ruled Iran between 1797 and 1925 and presided over a prolonged period of political and economic decline), Riza Shah first inflicted a comprehensive political defeat on the exhausted Qajar political order and, following the Qajar elite’s accommodation to his regime and acceptance of his new dynasty, guaranteed the ascendancy of a class drawn 10

INTRODUCTION

essentially from that elite and its lieutenants among the modern intelligentsia. Cronin shows how, within the harsh terms of the nationalist project of early Pahlavi Iran, the rural poor offered terms and formulated responses on their own account. Despite the paucity of their material and ideological resources, the rural poor made persistent efforts to modify and occasionally to challenge both their existing circumstances and the impact upon them of the novel and radical policies introduced in Iran during the 1920s. These efforts seem to have acquired a greater then usual dynamism (and an ability to leave evidence in the sources) particularly when they were lent support, albeit temporary and tactical, by the new regime itself in its own struggle with refractory remnants of the Qajar elite. It is clear from Cronin’s account that the constituent categories of the rural poor made in these years no bid to assert a hegemony of their own. Indeed they were quite incapable of offering any such bid. Rather they appear to have acted often as a consequence of being drawn into the orbit of other, more powerful and coherent, social forces, whether the industrial working class, the urban intelligentsia or the functionaries and ideologues of the new state itself. Although the narrative contained in this chapter clearly demonstrates the pervasiveness of peasant activism and agency, it also demonstrates the extent to which this activism was inevitably limited in its scope and political object, and incapable of posing anything other than local perspectives. It also illustrates the rather conservative nature of this activism. The struggles of the rural poor in Iran described here, insofar as they were anti-capitalist or opposed to ‘modernity’, sought neither to overturn existing private property relations nor to transcend them, but rather evinced a desire to restore the status quo ante, specifically a mythologized version of ancient collective forms of ownership. Caught between forms of economic exploitation and political subordination which were, on the one hand ‘traditional’, represented by subsistence agriculture and pastoralism and the rule of the khans and rural magnates, and on the other hand, ‘modern’, represented by private property and the authoritarian state, the rural poor experienced a series of crushing defeats in the 1920s. Their struggles were denied and suppressed at the time and have been largely ignored or forgotten since. Nonetheless traces remain, in archives and in folk memory. Although the narrative which may be reconstructed from these traces is ‘necessarily fragmented and episodic’,28 yet it provides a tantalizing glimpse of the realities of rural conflict conventionally obscured by the triumphant nationalist discourse of the new Pahlavi state. Part IV casts its searchlight further downwards, into the lower depths of Middle Eastern and North African society, to the marginal and the outcast, with studies of gypsies and slaves. Indeed marginality in the Middle East and North Africa has become a sub-genre of its own, perhaps reflecting a fascination among respectable scholarship with an underworld of deviance and transgression.29 Whereas the influence of social historians such as George Rudé, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm has been apparent in ‘history from below’ in general, in the analysis of the marginal, prisoners, prostitutes, the insane, the influence of Michel Foucault has been paramount.30 11

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Gypsies have constituted, everywhere and at all times, a marginal group par excellence. With their own social codes, boundaries and notions of transgression, mirroring those of non-Gypsy society, they have tried to protect themselves against a hostile social environment, surviving individually and collectively by the employment of the only strategies available to them, strategies of criminality and deviance which served to further reinforce their exclusion. In a highly original account, Faika Çelik first discusses the mechanisms, segregation, expulsion and stigmatization, through which Gypsies, both men and women, settled and nomadic, Muslim and non-Muslim, were legally and socially marginalized by the Ottoman state and society during the ‘classical’ period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Observing that avenues of upward mobility open to other subjects of the sultan, such as the devvirme,31 were closed to Gypsies, she describes the occupations and ways of life into which they were driven. These covered a spectrum from the more or less legitimate to the disreputable, to the legally forbidden but tolerated, to the criminal and downright sinister. The common Gypsy trade of iron-making, for example, easily metamorphosed into counterfeiting, while their most usual work, as entertainers, singing, dancing and fortune-telling, invariably descended into prostitution. Indeed Gypsies were particularly identified with prostitution, and ran many brothels in Istanbul. As well as making use of Ottoman legal codes for her analysis of the wider socio-economic realities and moral values of Ottoman society, Çelik also excavates Ottoman-Turkish oral traditions to explore the place of Gypsies and their image in popular culture. Her work also invites the application of a comparative perspective. She points out that, although Gypsies were a despised ‘Other’ in Ottoman society, they were never enslaved, as occurred in the non-Ottoman Balkans, nor were they persecuted. It was, after all, in Europe after the triumph of modernity that the Gypsies experienced their darkest historical moment in the Nazi death camps. In Chapter 8, Fatiha Loualich discusses the situation of emancipated female slaves in Algiers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the options available to them in terms of social advancement. As a recent study on slavery in Morocco has pointed out, although we are aware of the main features of slavery in the Muslim world, we have little detailed information on the material or affective conditions of slave life in these regions.32 It is this absence which Loualich begins to rectify. Such scholarship as exists on slavery in the Muslim world has tended towards an ‘artificially sweetened’ view,33 especially in light of frequent and inappropriate comparisons to slavery in the Americas and due to the Islamic legal prescriptions declaring the freeing of slaves to be a pious act. Certainly the conditions of slaves in the Middle East and North Africa never sank to the level of slaves on the plantations of the New World. Unlike the ante-bellum American South, the societies of the Middle East and North Africa were not slave societies, nor was economic activity geared to a free and open market. Their economic systems did not depend on slave labour. Slaves were rather employed mostly in domestic service and concubinage, were signs of power and prestige, and were items of consumption, not production.34 12

INTRODUCTION

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, black slaves were present in North Africa in relatively large numbers. It has been estimated, for the nineteenth century, that in an average year 20,000 slaves probably crossed the desert from West Africa to the Maghrib, this figure indicating about 2 million black people arriving in North Africa every 100 years. The conditions in which they lived varied enormously, depending on the wealth and status of their owners. The role of emancipation in checking the extent of slavery in the Muslim world has been the subject of some debate.35 In general, it seems that, although Islam did soften the institution by urging its believers to free their slaves, emancipation was far from the rule, and even when bestowed, was ambivalent, resulting in a condition barely distinguishable from the former slavery. The freed slave became a secondclass citizen and they and their male decendansts remained in a patron–client relationship with one who had freed them. Newly freed slaves continued to need social and legal protection, they lacked opportunities in work and were usually reduced to the lowest and worst-paid trades, or begging. It has usually been assumed that the prospects for emancipated women were even worse then for men, and that many ended up as prostitutes.36 Fatiha Loualich looks at the experiences of emancipated female slaves in Algiers. She clearly distinguishes between the situation of white slaves, mostly Christian Europeans who were often ransomed, and black slaves, who were never ransomed and repatriated, and between men and women. She describes the typical path followed by female slaves in Algiers, as they moved from slave to emancipation, and on to occupy the role of domestic servant. She demonstrates that a high proportion of slaves were women, reflecting the high demand for female labour, as domestic servants. She also shows that women were more frequently emancipated than men and that emancipated women eventually became relatively better off than their male counterparts. By focusing on women, Loualich challenges conventional views of the options open to emancipated slaves. Illustrating the importance of gendered history to understanding a complex social reality, she shows that freed women possessed access to a strategy not open to men. While social custom dictated that emancipated men marry only emancipated women, or even fall back to a slave woman, emancipated women were allowed to marry freeborn men, and often did so. Women were able to transform their social position by marriage since they were assimilated to the status of their husbands. Conversely, the marriage of a freeborn woman to an emancipated man was a social disaster for the woman and her family. Thus Loualich argues that in fact freed women possessed greater possibilities for social mobility then freed men. Furthermore, not only was marriage outside their own community to men well placed in the social hierarchy a route to social integration and advancement for emancipated women, but they also seem to have been in a stronger position than men to improve their independent financial position. Loualich provides evidence of the means used by emancipated women to accumulate modest means, including gifts from their former masters, bequests in wills and the endowment of a waqf. 13

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Clearly both the marginal groups described here, black ex-slaves of North Africa and Ottoman Gypsies, were the victims of widespread prejudice. Yet, although they were despised, Gypsies were never persecuted by the Ottomans, nor did the ex-slaves find their colour the absolute bar to social advancement which it constituted in other former slave-owning societies, such as the southern states of the United States. In general the societies of the Middle East and North Africa produced no intellectual equivalent to the ‘scientific’ theories of racial hierarchy which became so prevalent in modern Europe. These societies, which were in reality diverse and complex, multi-racial and multi-religious, lacked the sharp demarcations which modernity was imposing on contemporary Europe, the boundaries between free and unfree, black and white, legitimate and transgressive, remianing fluid, porous and permeable. Part V of the book illustrates the inadequacy of conventionally rigid dichotomies of European/Middle Eastern and elite/subaltern through studies of foreign, mainly southern European migrant workers. The European presence in the Middle East and North Africa has usually been understood to refer to an official and mercantile elite embedded within imperial or colonial power and cocooned within an assumption of racial superiority. Here, however, a different kind of European presence is described. Julia Clancy-Smith and Anthony Gorman, in their studies of pre-colonial Tunis and Egypt in the formative period of the ‘veiled protectorate’ (1882–1914), both problematize the counterpoint of indigenous/foreign and the equation of European/elite.37 Clancy-Smith takes up the story begun in Loualich’s account of white slaves. She traces the origins of the nineteenth-century European population of domestic servants in Tunis to slavery, beginning with a description of sixty Christian Neapolitan servants, freed slaves who had remained with their Mamluk masters after emancipation, probably for want of other options. She then shows how those whom today would be called economic migrants moved not into Europe but from Europe to Tunis, their numbers expanding rapidly during the nineteenth century, reaching 15 per cent or more of the city’s population by the 1870s, ‘although who and what was a European remained somewhat fluid for much of the century’. There was, for example, a large population of British subjects, although the majority of these were Maltese and some were Greeks; a group of families under French protection, some nationals, some not; and an uncertain number of Italo-Sicilians. Clancy-Smith shows Tunis as a place of work and even opportunity for those denied it in their own country, and shows how, although the lives and circumstances of these European subalterns were being defined and refashioned by the changing relations between North Africa and the West, yet there was never a straightforward correlation between nationality and class. Most of the migrants who went to Tunis in search of a living, both men and women, initially became domestic servants, moving to tavern or hotel work by the last quarter of the century. Clancy-Smith points out that, although from mid-century the growing number of hotels, cafes, restaurants, taverns and inns in the city, catering to Europeans, 14

INTRODUCTION

functioned as mechanisms of social betterment for some newcomers, misfortune was never too far away. She concludes her account with a portrayal of those migrants, their fate obscured by false notions about the automatic prestige possessed by Europeans, who failed to make a living and fell into abject poverty, became down and out. Clancy-Smith describes with sympathy the lives of the southern European poor who, battered in their own countries by economic and political forces over which they had little control, ventured to Tunis in search of a better life. Her account concludes in 1870, a decade before the French occupation of Tunis in 1881. French colonialism was of course to transform the position of the European poor in North Africa and the character of their relations, economic and political, with the indigenous society. Within the context of French political and military power, these poor migrants from Italy, Spain and Malta, as well as from France itself, attached themselves to the colonial state and became part of a settler-colonial elite, benefiting directly from the dispossession of the native population. This transformation was to be finally and most infamously represented by the ‘pieds noirs’ of Algeria. Anthony Gorman also discusses European migrant workers, but not only as subalterns moving horizontally from the bottom of European society to the bottom of Tunisian society in their struggle for survival and betterment, but as militant and conscious activists in the vanguard of the Egyptian working class. Gorman observes that Egypt, like Tunis, was an ethnically plural society, and that the concept of Egyptian ethnicity developing within the framework of modern nationalism tended to obscure the actual diversity within its population. Many of the foreign workers whom he discusses were born in Egypt of families who had been resident there for generations. He describes a diverse mix of foreign workers, Armenians, Greeks, Levantines, Italians, Maltese and various other European nationalities, some of whom did not hold foreign nationality and those who did were not under the system of Capitulations, subject to Egyptian law. In common with recent scholarship on other Middle Eastern countries at a similar threshold of modernity, Gorman, through his analysis of the ideological and political activities of foreign workers in Egypt, disputes the accuracy of the ‘nationalist–imperialist polarity’, the ‘dichotomy of the Egyptian and the foreign’.38 On the contrary, he argues that foreign workers, although occupying a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis the mass of the Egyptian labouring poor, nonetheless directed their ideological and political energies towards developing an internationalist trend that sought to defend the rights of both foreign and Egyptian workers against capital and the colonial state. Articulating an idiom based on a conception of a common working-class interest, this trend constructed a muliti-ethnic class-based identity that opposed affiliations based on nationality and religion. Gorman uses a rich periodical and pamphlet literature to reconstruct his account of the activities of these workers. He describes their formation of new and militant labour organizations and their adoption of industrial tactics based on 15

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a core of anarcho-syndicalist ideas then thriving in the countries of southern Europe from which these workers were predominantly drawn, and their extensive intellectual and educational activities. He goes on to discuss their political conflicts with both nationalist and imperialist elites, and their economic struggle with the emerging capitalist system, showing how these activists were inspired by a commitment to internationalism, brotherhood and self-help as a way to defend the collective interests and rights of the worker, to combat the depradations of capitalism, and to oppose the malevolent authority of the state. In certain respects these foreign workers played the same role as migrant workers, both internal and international, in other countries of the Middle East, acting as a conduit for the transmission of ideological radicalism and new organizational forms.39 Furthermore, their internationalism may be seen as profoundly in their own interests. Only within such a discourse could they carve out a future for themselves within an independent Egypt. Naturally opposed by the colonial state, the syndicalist labour unions were also challenged by Egyptian nationalists, who attempted to rally workers to a multi-class agenda, and by the bourgeois leadership of local ethnic communities who aimed to keep control of ‘their own’ working class. Gorman concludes by stressing the significance of the legacy of these foreign workers. Although the political landscape shifted in favour of nationalism after 1919, leading to a decline in syndicalism, radical labour activism was channelled into the new communist movement where foreigners and foreign workers would again play an important role. Indeed, right up until the Nasser period, foreign workers in specialized sectors in the Egyptian economy continued to be active in progressive politics. Part VI of this volume discusses the intervention of subaltern groups in the independence struggles of the region and the often complex and tense relationship between subaltern demands and forms of activity and elite nationalist movements, with two case studies of very different political moments, the Greek fight for statehood against the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, and the continuing Palestinian struggle for national independence. Although popular mobilizations have been essential for the victory of elite nationalist movements, which have in ideological terms always advanced a multi-class agenda, the survival in power of those elites after independence demands the rapid closure of subaltern activity. For example, subaltern protests such as bread riots may, in preindependence years, be integrated within the discourse of nationalist elites as exemplifying the nationalist spirit, but after independence be disowned by those same elites as primitive and reactionary. Part VI begins with a discussion of another marginal group, but one with a quite different social position and role to that of the despised and detested gypsies. Gerassimos Karabelias provides an account of the part played by Greek bandits in the war of independence, detecting in the nature of their contribution and their subsequent treatment a compass for understanding key features of the evolution of modern Greece. Bandits constituted the backbone of the forces fighting the Ottomans and Greek political and military leaders used their services 16

INTRODUCTION

extensively. Yet after the creation of the new state, the new ruling political and economic elites were quick to depict them in extremely negative terms, as common robbers and criminals and as deserving of harsh repression and punishment. Karabelias’s chapter touches on another debate which was one of the earliest to flourish in the field of ‘history from below’. It is indeed now impossible to discuss the meaning of the phenomenon of banditry without reference to the work of Eric Hobsbawm whose famous book sparked an ongoing controversy among social historians. The bandit has often been depicted in popular discourse as a representative and a champion of the rural oppressed and it was this attitude, and the social reality which lay beneath it, which Hobsbawm theorized in a number of case-studies. However, Hobsbawm’s imputed inclination to romanticize banditry has been criticized by Anton Blok and Karen Barkey, who have pointed out that bandits have often acted not as challengers to, but as enforcers of, landlord power in the countryside.40 Karabelias admits that shepherds and peasants often suffered from bandit depradations, yet he cites the large body of popular songs and poems which glorified their actions and expressed admiration for their defiance of an unjust and oppressive government and central administration. It seems that, whatever the reality, everywhere there has been a marked tendency for popular discourse to contrast the power of the bandit, transformed into a mythical figure imbued with heroic qualities, with the venality, corruption and cowardice of the authorities, probably reflecting not the actual experience of the rural poor at the hands of bandits but rather their resentment at their treatment by landlord and state. Thus far, in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, the figure of the bandit has been investigated more deeply in literature than in scholarship, for example in the novels of the Turkish author, Yashar Kemal.41 Yet the bandit is by no means of purely historical significance. Hobsbawm, in a response to the critiques produced by his original thesis, produced a reflection on the mutation and survival of social banditry in developed capitalist economies up to the present day. In the Middle East and North Africa banditry, far from being merely a survival from the past, was often the product of the very process of modern statebuilding. Across the region the introduction and enforcement of conscription, for example, led to an increase in banditry as reluctant recruits and deserters fled to the countryside. According to the view of nationalist elites in the region, banditry typified a period characterized by the weakness and disintegration of state authority, the backwardness and isolation of the countryside, and the uncontrolled power of the tribal khans and their armed followers. According to this view, with modernization and national integration, banditry, already an anachronism, would easily be suppressed. In fact, however, the twentieth century saw, in many countries, not the gradual disappearance of banditry, but rather a change in its character, a ‘modernization’ of banditry into new forms of criminal activity such as smuggling, kidnapping and even armed rural separatist groups. Karabelias shows how the Greek nationalist elite first used, and then suppressed, a subaltern rural mobilization. Roger Heacock, in a discussion of the Palestinian 17

STEPHANIE CRONIN

resistance to Zionism, adopts a similar framework to understand the dynamics of the second, ‘al-Aqsa’ intifada. In rethinking the predominant historical interpretations of national resistance in India Ranajit Guha and others argued that the historical protagonists in colonial India were in reality neither the dominant groups of the indigenous society nor the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country. Heacock admits that the relationship between Palestinian elites and masses was and is blurred because of the precariousness of the social formation, always threatened with obliteration, and it is not easy therefore to set the Westernized elites and the locally nourished movement in stark contrast to one another. Yet he details how the poor, the camp dwellers and villagers cum wage labourers of the Occupied Territories always showed the greatest readiness for militancy, and how the al-Aqsa intifada in reality pitted the leadership created by the Oslo Accords and its middle- and lower-middle-class supporters against the broad masses of the people in the camps and villages. He concludes that, to a great extent, the al-Aqsa intifada was the continuation of a movement of national resistance by the dispossessed against the Israeli occupation, after a seven-year hiatus based on the Oslo Accords, but it was also significantly a movement imposed by the dispossessed on their own reluctant elites who were deemed responsible for the degradation of living conditions and widespread corruption. The efforts and sacrifices of the intifada were borne overwhelmingly by the people of the refugee camps and the villages, day labourers, peasants and the unemployed. These chapters, by the intensity of their focus on the oppressed and the excluded, offer a challenge to the elitist nature of the conventional history and historiography of the Middle East and North Africa and propose new directions for research. The collection is unique in its historical depth, ranging from the medieval period to the present, and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire/ Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. It is the first to encompass both major social classes and sectors, the working class, the peasantry, the urban poor, women, and marginal groups such as gypsies and slaves, and their differing strategies: of survival, of negotiation and of protest and resistance, and to attempt to develop comparative perspectives consciously based on the adoption of parameters drawn from the work of the great European social historians. Bringing together a range of scholars working on different countries and different themes within the general field of Middle Eastern and North African ‘subaltern studies’, the collection hopes to begin to overcome the highly fragmentary nature of this field, and the marked tendency for scholars working on different countries to remain isolated within their national and chronological boundaries. The focus of this volume has remained resolutely fixed on the subaltern yet, as Gramsci observed in his inspirational ‘Notes on Italian History’,42 the history of subaltern classes is inevitably and inextricably intertwined with the history of civil societies and of states. Thus, through the study of the subaltern, much may be revealed not only about the experience and narratives of the powerless 18

INTRODUCTION

but also about the nature of the powerful, whether classes, regimes, states or economic relationships. In this collection we set ourselves the task of attempting to begin to reconstruct something of the lives of those in the region whose history has been largely forgotten, and even sometimes deliberately erased. We have tried to recover, as Gramsci instructed, ‘every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups’.43 Having begun this project with the intention not of surrendering to, but of overcoming, the ‘fragmented and episodic’44 character of the subaltern histories we have recorded here, we conclude with the hope that these narratives may point towards new possibilities for writing a ‘people’s history’ of the Middle East and North Africa.45

Notes 1 See, inter alia, Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘History from Below – Some Reflections’, Frederick Krantz (ed.), History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé (Montreal, 1985), pp. 63–73; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Basingstoke, 1984); Ranajit Guha et al. (eds), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (11 vols, Delhi, 1982–2001). The use of the term ‘subaltern’ derives from Antonio Gramsci, see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, 1971), pp. 52–5. 2 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963, 1968), p. 13. 3 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Surveys from Exile, ed. and introd. David Fernbach (London, 1973), p. 146. 4 For a Marxist critique of Subaltern Studies see Tom Brass, ‘Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized (Middle) Peasant’, Vinayak Chaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London, 2000), pp. 127–62. For the history of Subaltern Studies see, inter alia, Chaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago IL, 2002); David Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia (Wimbledon, 2002). 5 Gramsci originated the use of the term ‘subaltern’ as a codeword for the more obviously Marxist ‘proletariat’ in order to evade the Italian Fascist censorship. Its subsequent evolution has been the subject of some controversy. Guha’s definition has been criticized as politically and sociologically problematic, its all-embracing social composition resulting in the presence of economically opposed subjects within the category of the subaltern/subordinate, leading to ‘the sliding, increasingly elusive and finally vanishing category of class’. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Brass, ‘Moral Economists’. 6 Driss Maghraoui, ‘The Moroccan Colonial Soldiers: Between Selective Memory and Collective Memory’, Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (ed.) Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib (New York, 2000), pp. 49–70. 7 Ahmad H. Sa‘di, ‘The Politics of “Collaboration”: Israel’s Control of a National Minority and Indigenous Resistance’, Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, November 2005, pp. 7–26. 8 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 5–23. 9 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven and London, 1985, p. xvi; see also The Moral Economy of the Peasant,

19

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10

11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

New Haven and London, 1976; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven and London, 1992. For an application of Scott’s approach to the Middle East see Fereydoun Safizadeh, ‘Peasant Protest and Resistance in Rural Iranian Azerbaijan’, in Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (eds), Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (Miami, 1991). Such deferential appeals to socially sanctioned values might, however, occasionally be backed up by anonymous and much more menacing communications, such as Iran’s shabnamahs (night-letters). See Stephanie Cronin, ‘The Tehran Crowd and the Rise of Riza Khan: Popular Protest, Disorder and Riot in Iran’, International Review of Social History, vol. 50, part 2, 2005, pp. 167–2001. On the general significance of anonymous threats, and the seriousness with which they were viewed by the authorities in a European context see E.P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, Cal Winslow (eds) Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1975), pp. 255–344. See, for example, Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge, 1985). The recent appearance of a textbook is a sign of a growing implantation within the field. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2001). This work contains a comprehensive bibliography on ‘history from below’ for the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Egypt and Bilad al-Sham, but excludes Iran and North Africa. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). These methodological difficulties have been rehearsed with increasing sophistication within a range of Subaltern Studies publications. See, most famously, G.C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988). Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History, Syracuse, NY, 1998), p. 9; Donald Quataert, International Labor and Working Class History, special issue on Ottoman Labor History, no. 60, Fall 2001. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976), p. xvi. For a further example of the possibilities of medieval ‘history from below’ see Boaz Shoshan, Popular culture in medieval Cairo (Cambridge, 1993). See George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (London, 1964), pp. 3–16. Perhaps the most significant use so far of police records in Middle Eastern studies has been by Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ, 1978) although the focus of this work was on political, rather than social, history. Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905–1953’, Past and Present, vol. 41, December 1968, pp. 184–210; see also ‘The Crowd in the Persian Revolution’, Iranian Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, autumn 1969, pp. 128–150. This may also, however, be an optical illusion produced by the sources due, for example, to the tendency of policing and judicial authorities quelling political riots to arrest and prosecute male ringleaders. In instances where the policing net was cast wider, women were more in evidence. For a discussion of this point, see Tim Harris (ed.) The Politics of the Excluded, c1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 17–20. Cronin, ‘The Tehran Crowd’, pp. 194–5. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Customs in Common (New York, 1991). Thompson’s article proved both influential and provocative. For a recent reappraisal, see Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (eds) Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Basingstoke, 2000). J. Walton and D. Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment (Oxford, 1994).

20

INTRODUCTION

24 See, for example, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class (Princeton, NJ, 1987); Ellis Jay Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930–1954 (Berkeley, CA, 1986); Zachary Lockman, ‘ “Worker” and “Working Class” in pre-1914 Egypt: A Rereading’, in Zachary Lockman (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany, NY, 1994). 25 For the role of such peasants-turned-workers as transmitters of urban unrest and political ideas see Eric Wolf, ‘Peasant Rebellion and Revolution’, in Jack A. Goldstone (ed.), Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Studies (San Diego, CA, 1986). 26 A scan of the contents of the Journal of Peasant Studies reveals how little work of this kind has been done on the Middle East and North Africa. For some examples see M. Buheiry, ‘The Peasant Revolt of 1858 in Mount Lebanon: Rising Expectations, Economic Malaise, and the Incentive to Arm’ in T. Khalidi (ed.) Land Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East (Beirut, 1984), pp. 291–301; Julia ClancySmith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Popular Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algerin and Tunis, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, 1994); Ellis Goldberg, ‘Peasants in Revolt: Egypt 1919’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 1992, pp. 265–80; and the collection edited by Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury, Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (Miami, FL, 1991). The Egyptian peasantry has probably received the most attention. See, for example, Nathan J. Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: The Struggle Against the State (Yale, CT, 1990); Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge, 1992). Although there is still relatively little work on the rural producer as a conscious political actor, the literature on agrarian relations and the various land reforms is rather more plentiful. 27 See, especially, E.J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969); see also the work of Rodney Hilton on the medieval English peasantry, for example, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1977); Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London, 1985). 28 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 54–5. 29 See, for example, Eugene Rogan, Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London and New York, 2002). For a pioneering study of itinerant crooks and petty criminals see C.E. Bosworth, The Medieval Islamic Underworld (Leiden, 1976). 30 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the French-language literature on marginality in the Middle East and North Africa is especially rich. See, for example, Malek Chebel, L’Esprit de Serail: Perversions et Marginalités au Maghreb (Paris, 1988); Fanny Colonna and Zakya Daoud, Eˆtre Marginal au Maghreb (Paris, 1993); Dalenda and Abdelhamid Largueche, Marginales en Terre d’Islam (Tunis, 1992), Abdelhamid Largueche, Les Ombres de la ville, pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis (XVIIIème et XIXème siécles) (Paris and Tunis, 2000). 31 The devvirme was a form of human taxation, a compulsory levy of Christian boy children. It constituted a mean, by which large numbers of Balkan Christians entered the political and military elites of the Ottoman Empire. 32 Mohammed Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco (Basingstoke, 1999). 33 The phrase is Mohammed Ennaji’s. 34 See R. Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves (New York, 2001); Vanessa Martin, The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Nineteenth-Century Persia (New York and London, 2005), 150–82; B.A. Mirza’i, ‘The African Presence in Iran: Identity and its Reconstruction in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Outre-mers: Revue d’Histoire, 2002, no. 2, pp. 229–46.

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35 See Ennaji, Serving the Master, pp. 53–65. 36 Ennaji, Serving the Master, p. 58. 37 The port cities of the eastern Mediterranean have recently attracted considerable attention from social historians due to their polyphonic nature and the intensity of their interaction with the wider worlds. See, for example, Rogan, Outside In. 38 For a similar analysis, see, for example, Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy and the Origins of Feminism (New York, 1996). 39 This phenomenon has been extensively studied in relation to the early spread of socialdemocratic ideas in Iran through the migration of Iranian labourers to the Baku oil fields. See Touraj Atabaki, ‘Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire’, International Review of Social History, 2003, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 401–26; Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, pp. 21–2. 40 Hobsbawm, Bandits; Anton Blok, ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 14, no. 4, 1972; Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY, 1994). 41 See, for example, Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk, translated by Edouard Roditi (London, 1990). See also David Hart, Banditry in Islam: Case Studies from Morocco, Algeria and the Pakistan North West Frontier (Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 1987); David Prochaska, ‘Fire on the Mountain: Resisting Colonialism in Algeria’, in Donald Crummey (ed.) Banditry, Rebellion and Social Protest in Africa (London, 1986). 42 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 44–120. 43 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 54–5. 44 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 54–5. 45 We thus implicitly reject that tendency within Subaltern Studies which has been criticized for its ‘postmodernist valorization of the fragment’ and which has challenged the very possibility of constructing a totalizing national history through narratives of subaltern experience. For a discussion of this point see Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p. 18. For exponents of this tendency see Gayanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader (Minneapolis, MN, 1998) pp. 1–33; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi and Oxford, 1994); Shahid Amin, Event, Memory, Metaphor (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1995).

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Part I THE URBAN CROWD AND POPULAR PROTEST

1 STREET VIOLENCE AND SOCIAL IMAGINATION IN LATE-MAMLUK AND OTTOMAN DAMASCUS (c.1500–1800) James Grehan

Crowds have always puzzled historians. As essentially anonymous and spontaneous movements, they often seem to possess a mysterious, irrational, and even primal quality. They can form suddenly and unpredictably, unite strangers behind an apparently common cause, move through the streets as if acting with a single will, and then unexpectedly melt away into the surrounding neighborhoods and markets from which they came. Explanations are not easy to find. Once the sound and fury have subsided and participants have left the streets, it is nearly impossible to trace identities or determine individual motives for joining demonstrations. This obscurity only deepens when one moves to the more distant past, as the number of records and firsthand accounts rapidly dwindles. Due in large part to these murky and confusing features, crowds appeared to an earlier generation of scholars as profoundly disquieting breakdowns of the civil order, which the scholars most often attributed to groups on the fringes of law-abiding society. Many authors expressed their unease by uncritically accepting and promoting a number of myths, which collectively took their place in the literature as the credulous, fickle, simple-minded “mob.” One of the most renowned exponents of this view was the French sociologist Gustave LeBon (d. 1931), who argued that crowds were “governed by forces of which we are unconscious” – hence, their imperviousness to the calm voice of reason and sobriety. As he blandly assured his readers: “among the special characteristics of crowds, there are several – such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides – which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution – in women, savages, and children, for instance.”1 Only with the growth of social history over the past generation have these condescending stereotypes lost ground to more sophisticated and sympathetic images. Beginning with George Rudé,2 European historians have led the way in 25

JAMES GREHAN

showing how, contrary to received opinion, crowds were not outsized bands of criminals, vagrants, working-class malcontents, denizens of the slums, and other marginal elements of society. In fact, they were often downright “respectable,” consisting of a broad spectrum of the working population, most of whom had a substantial investment in the welfare of the community. Even at their most violent moments, crowds were not mindlessly brutal “mobs.” They were guided by unspoken goals and ideals that transcended motives of hunger, envy, or revenge. In light of such discoveries, popular protest has come to appear not as a senseless outburst of hatred, hardly worthy of serious reflection, but as a rare window into some of the least accessible areas of popular culture. Despite increasing interest over the past generation,3 the study of the Middle Eastern crowd is still in its earliest stages. The challenges are particularly daunting for the premodern period, largely because of the nature of the sources. The greatest handicap for historians is undoubtedly the dearth of testimony from participants and witnesses. Even in a large town such as Damascus, one of the major centers of learning in the Ottoman Middle East, premodern culture was almost entirely oral. The great majority of people were illiterate – or virtually so – and left behind no traces of their personal lives in diaries or other writings that might cast light on their daily experiences. How, then, can we understand Damascenes’ perceptions of the social violence that occasionally racked their city? For this local perspective, we can begin by exploring the surviving literature produced in Damascus itself – above all, the chronicles and biographical dictionaries in which Damascenes recorded what they themselves regarded as the main personalities and events around town. All these accounts, of course, have their own limitations, starting with the identity of the authors, nearly all of whom were ulama (members of the local Muslim religious establishment). By background and training, they were privileged men – literate, educated, and honored as the living repositories of the Islamic tradition. The most eminent ulama easily ranked among the social elite, along with the great merchants and tax-farmers and the highest-ranking military officers and imperial officials. Their writings reflect their social position in displaying an overriding preoccupation with the affairs of the high, the mighty, and the learned. This elitist perspective was normal and seems to have characterized nearly all the literary output of the period. One of the most remarkable documents that has come down to us, the chronicle of Ahmad al-Budayri (d. 1763?), an ordinary barber, differs little from the narratives of his more educated and illustrious contemporaries. Even in the eyes of this humble artisan, the common folk rarely figure as anything more than the backdrop to the gaudy stage of high society and politics. In local accounts, popular protests therefore appear mostly as sporadic eruptions that shake the social order for a brief time before sinking again into the anonymous bustle of urban life. Authors took little interest in recounting these outbursts of frustration and despair. They report no manifestos, formal petitions, or even the crudest chants and rarely dignify crowds with more than a few lines of their attention. Visual clues are sparse and fleeting and reveal little about popular 26

LATE-MAMLUK AND OTTOMAN DAMASCUS

motives and beliefs. In eighteenth-century Cairo, for example, demonstrators sometimes pounded on drums, carried banners, and shouted appeals to the ulama, one of whom might be placed at the head of a public procession.4 There are spotty references to similar gestures in the crowds of Damascus, but the snapshots are no less dim and blurry. In 1716, rioting janissary soldiers were accompanied by a man who held a banner (‘alam), but we know of its existence only because the authorities, in making an example out of him, took their revenge by impaling him on it.5 Compared with other descriptions of civil disorder, this small detail was as exceptional as it was gruesome. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dwell on all the deficiencies in documentation. Though their accounts are often bare and laconic, chroniclers and biographers still have much to tell us, primarily through their intimate knowledge of the local scene and the conditions in which social unrest silently brewed. Whenever demonstrations or uprisings occurred, they were quick to name the leadership and affiliation of crowds, which seem to have been an open secret that Damascenes learned easily by word of mouth or inferred from the latest trends in urban politics. Through this urban grapevine, from which the authors drew much of their information (if they did not witness the events themselves), it is possible to work up a general image of popular protest. But can anyone really speak of a single image, as if the crowd presented the same face and held the same significance for every generation? Popular protest is no different from other aspects of popular culture insofar as the slow pace of change can create the illusion of a timeless “folk” tradition persisting over the centuries. Contemporaries themselves were frequently unaware of many shifts in custom and belief, for which the brief span of a lifetime is a deceptive unit of measurement. To illuminate these seemingly glacial movements, we need to study popular protest over the long term, thereby bringing together several centuries of accumulated perceptions. From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, the culture of protest in Damascus underwent precisely this kind of gradual transformation. Local observers began to emphasize a new understanding of demonstrations, which diverged from earlier traditions and thereafter acquired distinctively “Ottoman” traits. Thus, the transition to Ottoman rule, which had such obvious consequences for the political and economic order, also left its imprint on habits of thought. Some of the effects have already been noted for the upper reaches of society, particularly among the leading ulama, who drew ever closer to the Ottoman religious hierarchy.6 But the scope of these changes extended beyond strictly religious and administrative affairs and touched the broader political culture, which, like Damascus itself, evolved markedly during the Ottoman period.

Not all crowds are alike If the crowd has many faces, as Rudé would remind us, we should be equally aware that there are many types of crowds. The first task, then, is to understand 27

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the subtle differences in mass behavior that Damascenes sometimes noticed but hardly bothered to define with any precision. At the outset, we should recognize that not all crowds were violent or driven by opposition to the authorities. Chief among these docile gatherings were the large meetings that took place in mosques, particularly for the noon prayers on Friday, in which the sermons typically had a political as well as a religious function. In the grand tradition of Islamic politics, both the Mamluk and Ottoman authorities made use of these congregations for their own ends. Shortly before his death in 1498, the ailing and perhaps repentant governor of Damascus had his entourage distribute 2,000 dinars to a crowd of “the poor and unfortunate” at the Umayyad Mosque, which “shook from the multitude of voices.”7 The Ottoman Sultan Selim I showed the same flair for public munificence during his brief stay in the city. After returning from the conquest of Egypt in 1517, he appeared one Friday at the main mosque in al-Salihiyya, the northwestern suburb of Damascus. As the noon prayer concluded, he was besieged by a swarm of “the poor, beggars, and women” who were hoping for alms. Seizing the opportunity to strike a benevolent pose, the sultan ordered that the women be sent into the mosque and the men into al-Qaymari hospital next door, then showered both groups with pouches of coins.8 It was a deft touch of diplomacy, ensuring the sultan’s good name in a recently conquered city where the Ottomans were still establishing themselves. Some crowds were considered so useful that the authorities might go to great lengths to sponsor them. To aid the sultan’s forces in the field, one governor (1668) gathered all the people “except for a few” atop Mount Qasyun, which overlooked the city behind al-Salihiyya; the whole community then offered its prayers for victory (presumably in Crete).9 The demonstration came in the wake of an earlier emergency, during the dry winter of 1662–1663, when popular anxiety had mounted over the shaky prospects for the spring harvest. A large crowd had twice convened at the Umayyad Mosque, where a procession departed with great pomp to the suburbs to hold a public prayer for rain. According to the source, it was not until a third attempt that the pleas of the faithful were answered, ostensibly because the people had not conducted themselves on the previous occasions with the requisite modesty and humility.10 Religion was crucial in providing legitimation and support for the authorities, but it was not always so amenable to their control. Though normally committed to law and order, religious leaders were perfectly capable of stirring up hostile crowds or, with less fanfare, discouraging public cooperation by quietly withdrawing their support from offensive officials. Recognizing this potential for both active and passive resistance, the Egyptian commander Muhammad Bey Abu’l-Dhahab, who had a whole army at his disposal during ‘Ali Bey’s brief rebellion against Istanbul (c.1770–1772), first sought the acquiescence of the ulama before occupying Damascus with his troops in 1771.11 Exercising similar power were the Sufi shaykhs, influential and prestigious figures whose followings extended deep into local society. The governor’s attempt to ban the tahlila (1738), a cherished Sufi ritual, turned the entire city against him in an open revolt.12 28

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As he had failed to appreciate, popular loyalties were quickly activated in the name of religion. Many of the links between the religious establishment and the general populace ran through the marketplace, where guilds of artisans and merchants, often in alliance with the ulama, proved quite adept at organizing their own protests. One of the most prudent displays of anger was the closure of shops, often coupled with a boycott of the Friday prayer in the mosques. This early version of a general strike was the preferred method of applying pressure: opposition without actual violence, denunciation with a minimum of confrontation. Staged on a wide enough scale, this threat of violence could be as effective as violence itself. When the city’s silk weavers objected in 1491 to the extra financial levies demanded by one of the sultan’s companions (khassiki), they grabbed banners from local mosques and headed straight for the governor’s palace, where their noisy demonstration hastened a negotiated compromise.13 In 1703, the mere hint of an uprising caused the governor to cancel the forced sale (tarh) of silk that he had planned to impose on leading merchants. Speaking through the mufti, who had been carefully recruited to the cause, leading merchants brazenly reminded the governor that “even if there were thousands to defend you, the insurrection of the people would be difficult [to suppress].”14 Not every protest was capped with such success, but the marketplace was always ready to mobilize for its interests. Of a more informal nature than the guilds were the affiliations that bound together people of the same ethnicity or geographical origin. Damascus was home to large numbers of immigrants from throughout the Middle East, including minorities of Turks, Kurds, Turcomans, North Africans, and Persians, who testified both to the city’s cosmopolitan character and its reputation as one of the major religious centers of the Islamic world. Regardless of background, all these newcomers kept something of their original identity and often clung to their communities for protection and support. The murder of a Kurdish man, allegedly by a Baghdadi, set in motion a public feud in 1750 that began with armed Kurds (probably mercenaries) storming through al-Darwishiyya and Bab al-Jabiyya in a vain search for Baghdadi scapegoats. When two Baghdadis were murdered several weeks later, a group of their brethren (almost certainly mercenaries, as well), together with immigrants from Mosul and allies from local military units, appeared outside Khan al-Akrad (Khan of the Kurds) and provoked a heated gunfight in which a number of men were killed and wounded. Frustrated in their attempt to take the khan, they attacked nearby coffeehouses associated with the Kurds and might have done even more damage if the governor, As‘ad Pasha al-‘Azm (r. 1743–1757), had not personally intervened and prevented the conflict from spiraling out of control.15 Thus, ethnic and regional ties were not merely a matter of language, religion, and culture. For all these minorities, their identity was a lived social reality, placing them within familiar networks, determining wider allegiances and political alignments and, to one degree or another, marking them off from their fellow townspeople. No less important than these non-Damascene forms of identity was the sense of local attachment, of belonging to a particular quarter within the city. Set apart 29

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from the main thoroughfares, the residential areas formed crowded, self-contained worlds full of winding lanes and sudden cul-de-sacs and bounded by thick gates that were closed after dark. Each quarter had its own name, identity, and leadership, all of which bred a feeling of community among neighbors, who lived in close proximity to one another amid the dense urban construction that was typical of all Arab towns. In many parts of the city – especially outside the medieval walls – these loyalties manifested themselves in the formation of neighborhood gangs (pl. zu‘ar), who in the spirit of all extra-legal protection combined patronage with extortion. Few other organizations could raise crowds as quickly as the gangs, which were generally composed of young men who seem to have created their own subculture of honor, courage, and violence. They undoubtedly reached their heyday during the last decades of Mamluk rule, as the empire was slowly pushed toward its ultimate disintegration.16 Governors came to depend on them as supplemental levies for the army and did not hesitate to involve these makeshift militias in intra–Mamluk rivalries.17 Sensing the weakness of the state, gangs sometimes defied officials and were even known to attack Mamluk troops.18 They also fought with other gangs, acted as self-appointed guardians of their quarters, and occasionally staged public marches through the city in a show of strength and intimidation.19 After the conquest of Syria, the Ottomans took brutal measures to suppress them but could never root them out altogether.20 As late as the eighteenth century, chroniclers were still referring to local gangs and their leaders, proving that they were an essentially permanent feature of neighborhood life in many parts of the city.21 Although gangs remained active, their influence was soon eclipsed by janissary troops, who gradually intermingled with the local population through marriage, common economic interests, and the trickling of civilians into the ranks. By the seventeenth century, the corps had already lost of much of its rigor and discipline. Most janissaries resembled neighborhood toughs more than the crack infantrymen of an earlier epoch, but on the local scene they remained a formidable force. In Damascus, their position became unusually complicated on account of their open disloyalty during the revolt of Abaza Hasan Pasha, governor of Aleppo, in 1658. Seeking to divide and rule, Istanbul sent a contingent of fresh troops in 1660, dubbed the qabiqul (kapıkulları in Turkish), who took up residence in the citadel and adjacent neighborhoods in the northern suburbs, such as al-‘Amara. The local janissaries ( yerliyya), on the other hand, retained their control over the Midan and surrounding areas in the southwest and penetrated as far as the northwestern suburb of Suq Saruja.22 The unceasing rivalry between these two factions soon became one of the main flashpoints of local violence. Throughout these sporadic clashes, we should not be surprised to find residents from each of the janissary strongholds actively participating in the fighting. As André Raymond has observed for Ottoman Cairo and Aleppo, it is often possible to read local political alignments as if they had been plotted on a map.23 Damascus offers proof of exactly the same political geography as other large Arab towns, most notably during its turbulent eighteenth century, which ushered in a long period of paramilitary violence. To take one of the longest and bitterest 30

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feuds as an example: the prolonged disorders of 1757–1758 not only set the two janissary factions against each other; it also involved clients from their respective neighborhoods. During the first street battles in June 1757, the imperial janissaries besieged the southern neighborhoods of Bab al-Sarija and al-Shaghur, which supported the local janissaries. When fighting erupted again during the following month, the same imperial janissaries found it natural to call on their own allies in al-‘Amara (in the northwest), who joined them in attacking the southwestern neighborhood of al-Darwishiyya, where they burned warehouses belonging to officers of the yerliyya corps. They did not have to wait long for a response. Armed men from al-Haqla (in the southwest) reinforced the infuriated yerliyyya, and together they swarmed through al-‘Amara, torching homes and markets and driving scores of families into the Umayyad Mosque for refuge.24 The depth and durability of these attachments can be seen decades later, as local janissaries and their clients from the southern suburbs rampaged through al-‘Amara in 1802 during another round of clashes with the kapıkulları.25 In all of these actions, the line between soldiers and civilians is nearly impossible to draw with much precision. Can we therefore conclude that popular violence is really a projection of urban networks? In all of the preceding clashes and demonstrations, crowds were indeed mobilized by means of some preexisting social solidarity – above all, the bonds of religion, work, ethnicity, and quarter. As one historian has explained, “the existence of these [urban] networks makes it easier to understand why the Arab cities did not remain passive during the Ottoman era.”26 Only in this way, runs the argument, were the people able to come together and register their disaffection. Without these networks, they had no real voice in urban affairs – or, for that matter, in the making of history. The main problem with this view, which implicitly reads history from the top of the social order, is that some crowds had little or nothing to do with factional struggles and social networks and sprang up as entirely spontaneous gatherings. A few were tame and adoring, such as the throngs of women – “more than a hundred at a time” – who used to hover around Hasan al-Majdhub (d. 1619), a local folk saint (wali) and something of a celebrity about town.27 Others, however, proved far more explosive and can be regarded only as genuinely popular protests. It is not easy to categorize these movements, which were complex, disparate, and guided by only the loosest convictions, but they often took the form of tax revolts, bread riots, and demonstrations against corruption, extortion, and abuse of power. Chroniclers recognized the essentially popular character of many disturbances in their choice of terminology. Confronted with sudden uprisings that had no obvious links to organizations or factions, they attributed them by default to the “people” (‘amma, ‘awamm, or nas). All these terms are simultaneously vague and precise insofar as they capture the essential anonymity and spontaneity of popular protest, which, unlike mobilized crowds, existed only in the moment and possessed no more than a tenuous sense of solidarity. Members of military units, gangs, religious confraternities, ethnic groups, and other social cliques undoubtedly 31

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joined these movements but without taking command of them or acting in a coordinated manner. The most that can be said about some crowds is that they consisted predominantly – or, at least, originally – of residents from the same neighborhood. The murder of a Mamluk official in the Midan in 1504 resulted in a heavy fine, which, according to standard administrative practice, was levied on the entire neighborhood. When troops came to collect it, a large group of residents ambushed them and inflicted several casualties; among the slain was the official in charge of the expedition, whose corpse was paraded around the streets and thrown into an open sewage channel in Bab al-Musalla before it was finally deposited in a nearby cemetery.28 But few crowds were so closely associated with a single area of the city, and, in any event, knowing the location of a riot is no guarantee that all, or even most, of the participants lived in the same area. For contemporaries, who seemed to recognize this difficulty, it was enough to note that “the people have risen” (qamat al-‘amma).

Late-Mamluk depictions of popular protest Having recognized that the “people” might resort to violence, how did contemporaries understand the motives of crowds? One keen observer of the local scene was Ibn Tulun (d. 1546), a scholar who witnessed the Ottoman conquest of Damascus and left behind a large number of works that detailed the city’s development during his lifetime. His account of the final decades of Mamluk rule contains frequent references to popular protest, which seemed to intensify as the external struggle with the Ottomans found an echo in the convulsive politics of its largest towns. His terse but pointed commentary places the blame squarely on the shoulders of Mamluk officials, who unleashed violence in the streets through illegal and extortionate policies. One of the recurring themes was the corrupt or tyrannical governor (na’ib), who ignored the plight of the people or recklessly pushed them into open rebellion. Perhaps the most sensitive issue was the maintenance of the marketplace – which is really to say the supply of bread, which had been the staple of the diet since antiquity. Few causes stirred the emotions of townspeople like the rising cost of bread, which could single-handedly mean the difference between privation and prosperity for most of the population. One Friday afternoon in 1506, after the new governor had concluded his first prayers at the Umayyad Mosque, tempers began to flare as members of the congregation approached him with complaints about the widespread shortage of bread in the city (along with charges, which were fairly typical in times of crisis, that wine drinking had become rampant). Their grumbling came to nothing, however, and he refused to pay any attention to their pleas.29 Only during a later subsistence crisis (1513) was a crowd able to persuade another governor to set up a panel of supervisors, who began to regulate prices and sell “old wheat” (qamh ‘atiq) from storehouses in the citadel. Unfortunately, the measures proved worthless as the emergency supplies were sold short of weight on the market, and by the next day “there was no bread in Damascus.”30 32

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Despite the poor record of the Mamluk administration in handling these shortfalls – which in any case were often beyond the capacity of any premodern government to remedy – townspeople continued to view the governor as their main source of relief, or in more trying circumstances as the cause of their misery and despair. As the highest-ranking official in the city, he naturally loomed as the most visible target for their frustration and grievances and faced vocal criticism whenever he appeared slow or unwilling to act. Petty administrators and other servants of the state might also feel the fury of the crowd. The victims did not have to be active in shaping or implementing policy; they only had to be seen as an appendage of the regime or as the instrument of some particularly odious measure. When an ordinary crier announced the cancellation of certain old coins in 1480, bystanders tried to attack him as if he were somehow personally responsible for drawing up the decree himself.31 One can easily understand this reaction (which, admittedly, was extreme even by the standards of the day) as a way to strike vicariously at unpopular officials, whose high walls and armed retinues put them beyond the immediate reach of the people. Thus, the hapless crier, for one unlucky moment, became the incarnation of a detested policy and paid the price for decisions made by superiors. Most crowds appear far more discriminating. They were careful to track down individuals close to the real sources of power in town. Soldiers were particularly hated and, for many Damascenes, came to personify the abuses of Mamluk authorities. The execution of a young sharif, apparently without justification, incited a violent crowd in 1504, which then descended on Harat al-‘Abid, where slave-soldiers in the governor’s personal escort resided (the so-called ‘abid barudiyya). In taking their revenge, the rioters killed several soldiers and plundered homes throughout the quarter.32 Among local villains, another favorite was the tax collector, who was universally despised. In one unusually sensitive case (1488), an official brandished a sultanic decree that permitted him to share the profits of grain dealers and suspend inspections of the wheat supply. As the city boiled into an outright frenzy, a large group of townspeople chased him into the Umayyad Mosque, where his search for refuge ended tragically. After stabbing him at the tomb of Zachariah, his tormentors dragged his bloody body to the neighborhood of al-Kharab, where they burned him alive.33 Far more fortunate, though no more beloved, was the powerful Mamluk whose exactions pushed the village of al-Mezze, just to the west of Damascus, beyond the limits of endurance in 1485. The villagers, who were apparently familiar with urban forms of protest, pursued the more restrained course of petitioning the administrator in person and arousing public sympathy for their plight. They marched to his residence in the city, and for good measure they occupied the Umayyad Mosque as well.34 The arrival of a crowd at the Umayyad Mosque was neither an accident nor a detail that chroniclers were likely to overlook. Together with the censure of individual officials, it was the other outstanding feature of popular protest at the beginning of the sixteenth century. As the principal house of worship since the eighth century, the prestige of the mosque was unchallenged. It served as 33

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the focus of Islamic religious life and, together with the citadel, loomed as one of the most prominent landmarks in the city. Though it did not stand exactly in the geographical center of town, it acted as the pivot of communal consciousness, especially during public emergencies. Adding further luster was its international reputation for Islamic learning and widely recognized status as an important holy site that held the tombs and relics of several famous rulers and saints from Islamic history. No other place in Damascus was so steeped in the lore and heritage of Islam and, as a consequence, so deeply endowed with political symbolism. Rioters who entered the mosque did not simply run amok. They were conscious of its sanctity and almost reflexively made their appeals through religious ritual. The most conspicuous act was to mount the minarets and broadcast their grievances directly to the larger audience of the city, typically through takbir, the repetitive chanting of “God is great!” (Allahu akbar). The intention was not to subvert or mock religion but to challenge the Islamic credentials of authorities and thereby goad them into upholding the law. The punishment of a prominent Meccan by the chief chamberlain of Damascus sparked an occupation of the Umayyad Mosque in 1484 in which protesters swarmed up the minarets and publicized their dispute against him (kabbara al-‘amma ‘ala al-ma’adhin bi’l-jami‘ al-umawi ‘ala hajib al-hujjab bi-dimashq).35 An official sent by the new sultan in 1497 set off an identical disturbance not only in the Umayyad Mosque but also in mosques throughout the city after it was learned that he was planning to tamper with local religious foundations (waqf ; pl. awqaf ).36 In 1506, it was the lieutenant governor’s turn to incite unrest by imposing fines on the neighborhood of al-Qubaybat, in the southwestern suburbs of the city, as a penalty for several murders that had been discovered there. After he took hostages as surety for the payments, people from the area, holding banners and chanting the name of God, surged into the Umayyad Mosque and ascended the minarets. To rid themselves of this public embarrassment, the commander of the citadel and assistant chamberlain, acting in the absence of the lieutenant governor, soon freed the prisoners and cancelled the levies.37 Sometimes it was not enough to take over the minarets before or after prayers. Instead, protesters might insist on silencing the call to prayer altogether, sending one of the most forceful signals that law and religion had been profaned and that the entire town was now in the grip of a serious crisis. Two members in the entourage of an eminent shaykh were arrested in 1493 for conspiring to prevent donkey drivers from entering Damascus, probably as a prelude to manipulating local haulage. Soon afterward, an outraged crowd poured into the Umayyad Mosque, took over the minarets, and hindered the muezzins from issuing the normal midday and afternoon calls to prayer.38 Townspeople understood exactly what these spectacles meant and appear to have accepted them as legitimate, even righteous, acts of protest that sought – and claimed – religious sanction. The state, too, was careful not to suppress these demonstrations, keeping its distance and allowing passions to burn themselves out. It tacitly recognized popular expectations for justice and resigned itself to the paradox that religious symbols, which functioned as such a vital bulwark to power, could also be turned against it. 34

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These tactics never vanished entirely. Though far less common in later generations, they remained familiar to everyone, even when put to novel uses. The biography of one Damascene scholar, Mustafa al-Dimashqi (d. 1650), records how this talented man came to suffer from midlife fits of “melancholy” (al-sawda’), which affected his behavior in strange ways. One of his most outrageous antics was to mount the minaret of his neighborhood mosque and insult “some of the great scholars and shout their names” at the top of his voice.39 More dramatically, Hasan al-Rifa‘i chose the minaret of al-Daqqaq Mosque as his means of committing suicide in 1743. One evening, his brother-in-law brought a prostitute back to the house that they shared. Hasan confronted him, reproved him for his immorality, and in the ensuing altercation suffered a terrible beating. He appealed to the elders of the neighborhood for support, but they took no action. Sunk in shame and depression, he arrived at the mosque the next morning, said his prayers, and climbed the minaret. Addressing the entire congregation, he denounced the decadence of the times and promptly hurled himself below.40 Like Mustafa al-Dimashqi’s impromptu speeches, Hasan’s tragedy was an essentially personal act that held much less political than social significance. As a gesture of outrage, their use of minarets was more meaningful for the smaller stage of petty rivalries and personal grievances than for grand demonstrations over justice and oppression – more remarkable as the pulpits of broken and despondent individuals than as rallying points for entire neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the memory of earlier rituals had survived, and contemporaries had no trouble understanding the traditions on which these men were drawing. Long after Ibn Tulun’s crowds had receded into history, the mosque and its minarets could still be incorporated into messages of protest.

“Ottoman” images of the crowd It was during the long centuries of Ottoman rule that a subtle shift began to take place in attitudes toward popular protest. This break with Mamluk traditions implied neither a growing profession of loyalty to the Ottoman sultan and his dynasty nor anything like simmering resentment against Ottoman rule, which was never really questioned. It meant, rather, that Damascenes were gradually turning to new explanations for the behavior of crowds, which now seemed bent on a different kind of revenge. At the center of attention was a new figure – the qadi, or chief judge of the city – who soon emerged as one of the favorite scapegoats of elite commentators and ordinary townspeople alike. To be precise, one must distinguish between the chief judge (qadi al-qudat) and other judges in the local judicial hierarchy. The city had a qadi for each of the four madhhabs, or legal schools, recognized as orthodox in Sunni Islam. During the Mamluk period, these judges were already important figures in Damascus, especially the Shafi‘i qadi, who enjoyed slightly more state patronage than his Hanafi, Maliki, and Hanbali counterparts. In nearly all other respects, however, the judges shared a similar outlook and easily ranked among the urban elite. 35

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As state functionaries, they had a wide range of duties, presiding over the courts attached to their legal school, appointing deputies and other judicial subordinates, and administering the funds of charitable foundations.41 They also acted with other urban notables as informal representatives of the local population, with whom they wielded immense influence through their wealth, prestige, and social contacts. Standing with one foot in the state and the other in Damascene society, they often played a key role as mediators in factional or popular disputes, for which they were ideally qualified to serve as liaisons. This dual prominence gave them an uncommon visibility among both the ruling elite and ordinary subjects. One cost of this social distinction was that, as early as the Mamluk period, judges occasionally courted the wrath of the crowd. Although most of these disturbances were little more than conflicts with officials and soldiers or scuffles among cliques of ulama and students over jobs and stipends, a few rare episodes can truly be regarded as popular protests.42 In one of the most open confrontations, in 1495, the residents of al-Salihiyya were so unhappy with official treatment of their neighborhood, and so outraged at having to pay restitution for the murder of a Mamluk agent, that they staged a procession that almost reached the house of the chief qadi until the governor intervened and put a stop to it.43 Thus, it would not be entirely accurate to claim that demonstrations against judges were an innovation of the Ottoman period. As the events in al-Salihiyya show, there were certainly historical precedents. What really distinguishes Ottoman crowds, according to the evidence of contemporaries, was not necessarily the hunt for the qadi, but the frequency with which it occurred. Unlike authors of the Mamluk period, who hardly ever mention attacks on the qadi,44 those writing in later centuries increasingly point toward this office as a magnet for popular disaffection and violence. The new understanding of the crowd stemmed in large part from administrative changes made by the Ottomans in their first century as rulers of Syria. From the start, they made no secret of their preference for the Hanafi legal tradition, whose judge and judicial apparatus were now permanently elevated over their rivals.45 When Ottoman observers refer to the qadi of Damascus, they always mean the Hanafi qadi, whose supremacy was so widely acknowledged that no further comment was needed. Accompanying this shift within the religious hierarchy was the growing importance of the qadi within the larger administrative system. The governor (wali or basha) continued to function as the chief representative of the sultan’s authority, but, as Haim Gerber has argued, the Ottomans seem to have created a counterweight to this office by gradually expanding the powers of the chief judge in towns throughout the empire.46 The new prerogatives undoubtedly bred new suspicions. In one of their earliest measures (1516), the Ottomans officially transferred the duties of the muhtasib, or market inspector, into the hands of the qadi,47 who, in the eyes of the city, thereafter became one of the main culprits for high prices and food shortages. It did not help that the qadi, like the governor, was almost invariably a Turcophone outsider who came to Damascus and other Arab towns for a short term, often no longer than a year, before moving 36

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on to his next assignment. This peripatetic round of appointments made it highly unlikely that he would develop lasting ties with townspeople. By the end of the sixteenth century, the qadi had clearly emerged in local accounts as the main quarry of popular protest. Most attacks grew out of charges of administrative corruption, which contemporaries saw as one of the greatest evils of their day. The empire was faced with a series of internal rebellions (especially in Anatolia), mired in protracted warfare on the Persian and European fronts, and suffering from the onset of economic and demographic stagnation. Inflation was rampant, and the treasury was in disarray due to rapid and fitful devaluations of the currency. As salaries dwindled, some officials made up their losses by accepting bribes or resorting to extortion.48 The courts had never been entirely free of rumors of corruption and malfeasance,49 but by the 1590s, Damascenes believed that the problem had reached new and intolerable proportions. One qadı was considered so avaricious that a large crowd gathered outside the courthouse (1591) to demand back all the bribes and loans that he had previously pocketed. They made such a terrifying impression that, according to the source (who does not hide his hostility), he began to cry, and after borrowing money from a fellow judge made plans to flee the city immediately.50 In 1597, another qadi, equally renowned for his cupidity, made the mistake of provoking a tax revolt when he pressed ahead with plans to collect a large installment of irregular taxes (avarız in Turkish) in the midst of an economic slump. He was accosted at the Umayyad Mosque by two shaykhs who pleaded that the rate was excessive and that the people would be unable to pay “on account of their poverty.” When the qadi brushed them aside, “the people became agitated.” A crowd quickly formed and drove him from the mosque, denouncing his “oppression,” spewing ugly epithets, beating him with their fists, and hurling eggs that splattered over his clothes. In the end, he escaped only by taking refuge in nearby houses. Meanwhile, in a confusing twist of events, a separate crowd descended on the two shaykhs who had spoken on their behalf, apparently in the belief that they had done too little to dissuade the qadi. They pursued their victims through Bab Jirun, east of the Umayyad Mosque, until yet another crowd intervened. “Chase the qadi (ilhaqu al-qadi )!” they scolded their fellow townspeople.51 Their words could easily be taken as the motto for the new culture of protest. In 1598/1599, during an attack on a third qadi, demonstrators gave voice to exactly the same motif. “Damascus is a ruin,” they cried, “the qadi has ruined it (al-sham kharab, al-qadi kharrabaha)!”52 The tendency to focus on the qadi and the courthouse becomes unmistakable in eighteenth-century descriptions of popular protest.53 When a group of local mercenaries began seizing shops and extorting money from the local populace in 1707, the people tried to stone the qadi for failing to restrain them.54 Opting for more peaceful measures in 1724, the residents of al-Salihiyya closed their shops and called on the qadi, whom they accused of “much oppression,” to cancel a series of objectionable decrees. To avert an uprising, the qadi promptly backed down, thereby defusing the crisis.55 37

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Other protests centered on the supply of food. Whenever prices rose, public opinion suspected mischief in the marketplace and quickly demanded official inspections of the various merchants, brokers, millers, and bakers who handled the city’s grain. These anxieties were not entirely unfounded. Many local notables (pl. a‘yan) had become increasingly active in the grain trade, primarily through the purchase of tax-farms that allowed them to collect taxes (and whatever else they could wring from their offices) on behalf of the state. During years of scarcity, their control over a large part of the countryside inevitably fed rumors of sinister plots to manipulate prices and hoard secret reserves of grain. No one was immune from suspicion. In an entry for 1749, the chronicler al-Budayri accused Hamid al-‘Imadi, the chief mufti (the religious official who issued formal interpretations of Islamic law), of speculating in grain “like the notables and dignitaries who do not fear [God].” Word was spreading of a fatwa, or legal opinion, that al-‘Imadi had handed down to the brokers of the grain warehouses, who had approached him for permission to raise the price of grain to fifty piasters per ghirara. Not only had he given his consent; he had authorized them to sell at higher rates if they wished. “If the mufti of the Muslims has no compassion for the people,” lamented the barber, “there is no one else to blame.”56 Failure to keep prices down was often interpreted as official collusion, which was most evident in “a lack of inspections” of the markets.57 According to popular wisdom, only energetic regulation of the grain trade could prevent foul play and forestall widespread suffering. This skepticism toward the marketplace was so deeply entrenched that chroniclers might actually express surprise (as well as lingering doubt) when the price of bread dropped without the intervention of the state.58 Responsibility for inspections lay with the highest officials, including the governor and lieutenant governor (mutasallim), who might conduct their own occasional tours of the markets.59 But no one was more closely identified with the supervision of trade than the qadi, who had long assumed these duties within the Ottoman administration. The appearance of the qadi in the markets was enough to restore the confidence of the entire city at one stroke. During the dark days of 1757, as Damascus slipped into a prolonged civil war and news came of the annihilation of the pilgrimage caravan in the desert to the south, morale briefly revived after the qadi began to inspect local shops in person, checking prices and weights, and rendering justice on the spot. Violators received the bastinado at once, whereas compliant traders were rewarded with a silver missriyya.60 Matching this gratitude and relief were the gloom and pessimism spread by a corrupt or indifferent qadi who was either unwilling or unable to take action. The entry of Khalil al-Bakri, a native son who had been appointed as chief judge in 1752, was a cause for elation among much of the population (and, as the chronicler pointedly notes, a cause for consternation among others – presumably, the speculators and hoarders). Disappointment soon followed, however, as the people realized that he had no intention of doing anything about the high prices that reigned throughout the city.61 For most Damascenes, the connection was easy to make: the source of their troubles ultimately could be traced back to the 38

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courthouse, where the qadi was somehow personally accountable for their misery. In 1743, as the city quickly grew restless from a wave of soaring prices, grumbling voices were heard everywhere. Who received the blame? It was not the governor but the qadi whom the people openly cursed.62 Popular resentment against the qadi sometimes flared into the open as bread riots, which, as protests touching on survival itself, were among the most emotional disturbances, venting the desperation of the poor and occasionally leading to bloodshed in the streets. During a shortage of bread in July 1743, a crowd converged on the main courthouse, expelled its occupants, and began sacking bakeries. They held the qadi directly responsible for their hunger, and, citing a well-known theme, alleged a “lack of inspection of the owners of grain, the millers, and the brokers.”63 A second riot, in July 1745, was far more violent. When demonstrators approached the courthouse, the qadi’s entourage emerged with clubs and drove them back. But the crowd was not easily discouraged: flinging rocks, it soon regrouped and launched a counterattack. At this point, the qadi assumed personal command and ordered his men to open fire, killing one person, and wounding several others. The burst of gunfire further enraged the crowd, which then received unexpected reinforcements from local janissaries, who were probably using the fray to intimidate the qadi at a time that their faction held the upper hand in the city. The tide of the battle quickly turned as the attackers surged forward in a second wave, setting fire to the door of the courthouse and forcing their way inside. During the fighting that ensued, the attackers killed several of the qadi’s men. The others, including the qadi himself, barely escaped with their lives, fleeing ignominiously over the rooftops of neighboring homes until they reached the safety of the citadel, where they hid for nearly a month while local notables arranged for their personal safety and financial reparations.64 The clash was not soon forgotten. Several months later, the next qadi entered the city accompanied by an armed escort. To the chronicler al-Budayri, it was an unprecedented sight.65 But as the judges themselves quickly realized, the times had changed. They were now fully aware of their place in the public eye and of all the mistrust, animosity, and even violence that their office might inspire at the wrong turn of events. By the end of the eighteenth century, the qadi had become more than an important official. He and his courthouse were now one of the most visible emblems of the social order itself. Notables sometimes gathered at the courthouse to hear imperial orders being read aloud or to consult with the governor in one of his informal councils (diwan).66 In recounting the factional tumult that spilled onto the streets of the city in 1803, Hasan Agha al-‘Abd, a seasoned Ottoman official, noted that the qadi shut down his tribunal for ten days until the fighting died out.67 His comment is more than a casual detail dropped randomly into the narrative. It shows how the operation of the courthouse had become one of the main barometers of urban life. Suspension of legal proceedings could mean nothing other than a full-blown political crisis, a silent declaration that the city had come to the edge of the precipice. The symbolism of the courthouse in turn needs to be 39

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understood as the culmination of a long-term shift in attitudes toward the figure of the qadi. The growing attention that this office received is striking and provides strong evidence that an “Ottoman” culture of protest was gradually emerging in the city.68 This new logic for assigning blame and responsibility in times of unrest should not come as a surprise, for, as Charles Tilley has insisted, popular protest “is not an epiphenomenon. It connects directly and solidly with the great political questions,”69 among which historians of the Middle East can certainly place the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands.

Popular protest as deferential violence In our examination of popular protest, the Damascene crowd has taken shape entirely through the eyes of chroniclers and biographers, nearly all of whom came from a different social background from demonstrators and showed little inclination to identify with the “people.” Has this somewhat distant perspective skewed our understanding of these popular movements? Is it impossible, through this thick and perhaps deceptive filter, to learn anything about the beliefs and ideals of the participants themselves? Simply in sketching out the routes of demonstrations, observers have already enabled the crowds of Damascus to tell us a great deal about themselves. Mutely gesturing and explaining their motives beneath the narratives of the chroniclers, the protesters can still speak to us with their feet, for unlike Cairo under the French occupation (1798–1801), during which rioters often battled behind barricades constructed in their neighborhoods,70 popular protest in Damascus was almost always mobile. The itinerary of a demonstration was a significant detail that could be as eloquent in setting forth aims and expectations as any public manifesto. Of course, not all crowds are so easy to follow. Some were more unruly and unpredictable than others, and at their worst they could dissolve into a destructive stampede. The bread riot of May 1749, for example, was little more than a melee of hunger and vengeance in which demonstrators seemed to have no clear objective other than the plundering of bakeries in the marketplace.71 But as historians of Europe have long noted, popular protest is remarkable less for the violence that it unleashed than for its penchant for self-restraint and purposive action. This observation applies equally to Damascene crowds, which on the whole exhibited a discipline and cohesion that can have arisen only from a shared set of assumptions and expectations. People had a fairly consistent idea about what was right and wrong, legitimate and abusive, legal and extortionate. Their protest was not merely the blind release of frustration and rage; it was predicated on a widely held, albeit crudely expressed, understanding of the social order. Even at the height of their passions, crowds were careful to present themselves as the guardians of community values. Few incidents provoked the same outrage as the arrest in 1501 of a Mamluk (coincidentally, of “Frankish” origin) who had committed a string of murders and robberies in several neighborhoods near the 40

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citadel. The governor promptly ruled that the soldier should have an arm and a leg cut off, but the sentence failed to satisfy the crowd of local people who had gathered to watch the punishment. Unable to contain their fury, they seized the culprit, who was still alive and bleeding from his wounds, and began beating and stabbing him. The violence ended only after they had dragged him to the town scaffold in the neighborhood of Madhinat al-Shahm, and, as if imposing their own judgment, set fire to his body.72 Despite its viciousness, the gesture had its own significance, which went well beyond revenge. By hauling their victim to the scaffold, the crowd was invoking official procedures and in effect asserting the legitimacy of its actions. Overruling the authorities, whose responses were condemned as inadequate, it claimed the right to carry out its own rough brand of justice. On the surface, this vigilantism bears a distant resemblance to forms of popular protest in early modern Europe, where perceptions of abuse, exploitation, or negligence sometimes led crowds to rise up and usurp official prerogatives for themselves. Natalie Zemon Davis has shown how urban crowds in sixteenth-century France incorporated religious rituals into their protests and, as part of the larger climate of post-Reformation sectarian strife, performed symbolic purifications of their communities. Through these “rites of violence,” as she calls them, rioters might conduct their own executions, haul their victims off to jail in public processions, or stage their own heresy trials.73 E.P. Thompson reached a similar conclusion in his study of bread riots in eighteenth-century England. Crowds, he argued, adhered to a sort of “moral economy” that defended customary practices (sometimes enshrined in older portions of the legal code) against the doctrines of the emerging “free-market” ideology. In times of dearth, rioters did not hesitate to seize stocks of grain and sell them at a “just price” that they themselves determined, thereby placing the needs of consumers above the interests of suppliers and the rulings of magistrates.74 They regarded their actions as perfectly justified and openly claimed legitimacy by imitating official rituals, which, as they saw it, helped to distinguish their protests from mere lawlessness. Did rioting Damascenes entertain a similar image of themselves as surrogate agents of justice? Few crowds were so direct in taking matters into their own hands. In fact, they displayed a diffidence that, at its extreme, actually pushed some rioters into seeking formal authorization for their protests. One of the most reticent uprisings of the period came at the expense of a shaykh (and recent convert to Islam) who served as civilian supervisor of the army (nazir al-jaysh) under the Mamluk sultan al-Ghawri (r. 1501–1516). Grieving for his deceased son, the shaykh had tried to build a small mausoleum (qubba) near the shrine of Shaykh Arslan on the eastern edge of town, but the local people adamantly opposed it, ostensibly because the structure was being built in a cemetery attached to a waqf. Their reaction is instructive. Instead of simply knocking down the new tomb, they first showed a determination to legitimize their actions by appealing to two separate religious scholars. One refused to cooperate, but they succeeded in winning consent from the other, a mufti, who issued a fatwa in their 41

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favor. Only after receiving the mufti’s blessings did the crowd proceed on its rampage through the cemetery.75 So ingrained was this mentality that we can even find traces of it in factional violence. In 1730, the janissaries and their allies among the gangs of al-‘Amara staged a riot in the neighborhood of al-Salihiyya that resulted in the death of a leading member of the ashraf (sing. sharif ), the reputed descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. The ashraf soon began to fill the streets and clamor for vengeance. After first pleading with the official head of their organization (naqib al-ashraf ), who was so terrified that he immediately resigned his office, a delegation took the final step of approaching the qadi, who failed, however, to give a clear answer. The debate was rendered moot when a contingent of janissaries stumbled across them and opened fire.76 All these scrupulous precautions were not really typical of crowds but manifested a much deeper impulse and captured their instinctive caution. Demonstrators used violence not to overturn or arrogate authority but to activate it on their own behalf.77 Their behavior was essentially deferential, prodding and exhorting the social order to honor its professed ideals. Thus, popular protest had two distinct aims that coexisted within nearly every crowd. The first, which has always attracted more attention, was to rebuke or intimidate individuals – most often officials – who were held responsible for some wrongdoing or flagrant misconduct. Chroniclers commonly explained such aggression by relating social disturbances to acts of “oppression” (zulm). These attitudes are reminiscent of the “culture of retribution” that William Beik has found in the towns of seventeenth-century France, where crowds sought to punish governors, tax collectors, and other officials for alleged transgressions or obnoxious decrees.78 But the focus on violence is sometimes overstated, and even misleading, as it overlooks an equally important point about popular protest. Despite their frequent violence and unruliness, demonstrators were not really challenging the established order. They made relatively modest and conservative demands, and in bothering to approach officials at all implicitly reaffirmed the legitimacy and authority of the law, even if they objected to a few of its agents. In other words, popular protest petitioned as much as it denounced, supplicated as much as it threatened. This inner ambiguity was fully visible in the crowd that greeted the new governor in 1598/1599 outside his official residence (Dar al-Imara). When the chief judge arrived to offer a formal welcome, they implored the governor to do something about the bribery that was rampant at the courthouse; as the chronicler noted, however, “they refrained from stoning [the qadi].” Their mood changed only after the governor retreated into his palace. As the qadi took his leave, “they shouted in his face and addressed him with inappropriate words.” The verbal assault then escalated into a physical attack as they began pelting him with rocks and eggs, forcing him to flee along the moat of the citadel while “egg yolks and whites flowed from his turban and shoulders.” Only the intervention of soldiers prevented demonstrators from seizing him and inflicting more serious harm.79 Was the qadi the victim of a capricious crowd that hardly knew its own mind? The fickleness is only apparent. In its underlying logic, 42

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nearly every popular protest was simultaneously respectful and hostile, submissive and defiant, obedient and seditious.

Conclusion: crowds and a common culture The conflicting impulses within popular protest may explain why local accounts often contain a certain ambivalence toward it. Authors feared the potential for violence and disorder but stopped short of condemning the crowd’s actions. If officials had committed mischief or injustice, then they ought to be called to account. People had an implicit right to gather and demand an end to abuses. And because their actions contained deferential undertones, commentators could feel assured that the storm would pass and that their familiar world would not be turned upside down. The strongest hints of these attitudes crop up in the language used to describe crowds. Throughout the local literature, popular protest often appears in quite a different light from factional feuds, most notably in the choice of terminology. Confronted with popular demonstrations, authors were far more likely to define the crowd with neutral references, as an uprising of the “people.” Factional feuds, on the other hand, often came with pejorative labels, as chroniclers hardly bothered to conceal their contempt and distaste for what they were witnessing. Battles among janissaries, mercenaries, and neighborhood gangs appear as destructive rampages that could close the markets for days and bring severe hardship to the entire city. In the eyes of Ibn Tulun, the paramilitary gangs of the outer quarters qualify as little more than “riffraff ” (ru‘a‘), “rabble” (ghawgha’), and “ruffians” (zu‘ar).80 Looking on at fighting between the main janissary factions (1740), Ibn Kannan could not contain himself: “May God remove them from Damascus through His blessing.”81 To the barber al-Budayri, the local janissaries – “may God desire their destruction” – had become so decadent that “their corruption spread throughout the land and [all] the believers. Their leaders were a deviant band and rebellious faction,” thereby justifying ‘Asad Pasha al-‘Azm’s ruthless suppression of them in 1746.82 He was no fonder of the many mercenaries in town, such as the Dalatiyya, whom he rated “among the greatest degenerates” (min a‘zam al-mufsidin).83 In all these accounts, the disparaging tone is impossible to overlook and seems all the more conspicuous when measured against the restrained language that chroniclers reserved for popular demonstrations. Ultimately, popular protest had a legitimacy that authors did not extend to other kinds of social violence. It was one of the outlets that the local political culture allowed to desperate people who had reached the breaking point and could find no other remedy for their grievances. During the bread riot that occurred in July 1745, a large crowd, “raising their voices with wails and entreaties,” first gathered outside the governor’s residence, where they issued their usual demands for justice in the marketplace. The chronicler al-Budayri, who may have been a witness, has them plead, “You are the governor of Damascus and are responsible unto God for us and for all of these circumstances.” But the governor, who at the time was 43

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the formidable As ‘ad Pasha al-‘Azm, did not accept the crowd’s reasoning and insisted that the courthouse was the proper destination for their protest. “Go to the courthouse and complain about your condition to the qadi! (idhhabu ila al-makama wa ishku halakum ila al-qadi).” After momentarily wavering, the crowd agreed and immediately set out for the main tribunal.84 Throughout the confusion and strife, what is interesting about this bread riot is the ultimate unanimity of the participants – both the members of the crowd and the governor himself, who never disputed the right of the demonstrators to assemble in public. His main objection, which sprang only in part from the instinct for self-preservation, was merely that they had come to the wrong place. He needed no show of force, only a speech, to persuade them of their error. Having listened, the crowd offered no resistance, no counter-arguments. Each side understood the other perfectly well. Indeed, this bizarre deliberation in the midst of a riot makes sense only if everyone held the same premises about acceptable and legitimate behavior. It may seem odd, even paradoxical, to find signs of cultural unity in the midst of the deepest social turmoil, for we often think of violent conflict as exposing only the contradictions and tensions within a society. But in a larger sense, it can also reveal broad areas of agreement, shared values and ideals, and a deep-seated cohesion that transcends the divisions of the moment and quickly allows the social order to reassert itself. The “Ottoman” understanding of the crowd, which had slowly been taking root since the sixteenth century, was never confined to one particular social group or set of commentators. It expressed changing attitudes about justice, authority, and culpability that ultimately need to be set against the much larger transformation of local society under Ottoman rule. Popular culture was not inert. It responded to the political developments of this period, which brought a new legal, administrative, and fiscal framework to the Arab provinces. Among the upper echelons of society, one of the chief consequences of these changes, as one historian has aptly put it, was the progressive “Ottomanization” of provincial notables.85 Far more obscure are reactions at the more pedestrian level of neighborhood, market, and street, which are not so easy to track and may have varied considerably from one region to the next.86 Popular protest helps to bring this history of “mentalities,” often so dim and elusive, spectacularly into focus. If Damascus was truly typical of Arab towns, then “Ottomanization” must have occurred in profound and previously unexpected ways, reaching beyond the charmed and privileged circles of elite society, which have so captivated chroniclers and contemporary historians, and coloring the perceptions of ordinary people.

Notes 1 Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 49, 55–6. 2 George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964). 3 For some of the most notable studies, see Ervand Abrahamian, “The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905–1953,” Past and Present 41(1968): 184–210; idem, “The Crowd in the

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4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Persian Revolution,” Iranian Studies 2(1969):128–50; Gabriel Baer, “Popular Revolt in Ottoman Cairo,” in idem, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 225–52; Juan R. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 190–213; Juan R. Cole and Moojan Momen, “Mafia, Mob, and Shiism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala, 1824–1843,” Past and Present, 112(1986): 112–43; Ira M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143–53; Steven McFarland, “Anatomy of an Iranian Political Crowd: The Tehran Bread Riot of December 1942,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 17(1985): 51–66; Bruce Masters, “The 1850 Events in Aleppo: An Aftershock of Syria’s Incorporation into the Capitalist Economy,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 22(1990): 3–20; André Raymond, “Quartiers et mouvements populaires au Caire au XVIIIe siècle,” in Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, ed. P. M. Holt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); idem, “Urban Networks and Popular Movements in Cairo and Aleppo (End of 18th–Beginning of 19th Centuries),” in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Urbanism in Islam (Tokyo: Middle Eastern Culture Center, 1989), 2: 219–71; Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52–66. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siécle (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1974), 2: 432; Baer, “Popular Revolt in Ottoman Cairo,” 232. Much of this behavior resembles rituals of protest in early modern Europe. In eighteenth-century England, for example, demonstrators commonly beat drums, blew horns, hoisted flags, and, in the most volatile confrontations with authority, such as bread riots, might carry a loaf of bread daubed with blood or swathed in crepe. See John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (New York: Longman, 1979), 105. Ibn Jum‘a, al-Bashat wa al-qudat, in Wulat dimashq fi al-‘ahd al-‘uthmani, ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Damascus, 1949), 56; Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat shamiyya, ed. Akram Hasan al-‘Ulabi (Damascus: Dar al-Tiba’, 1994), 251. For other instances of banners being flown, see Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat al-khillan fi hawadith al-zaman, ed. Muhammad Mustafa (Cairo: Dar Ihya’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya, 1968), 1: 65, 146. See, for example, John Voll, “Old Ulama Families and Ottoman Influence in 18thCentury Damascus,” American Journal of Arabic Studies, 3(1975): 48–59. Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 203. Idem, I‘lam al-wara bi-man waliya na’iban min al-atrak bi-dimashq al-sham al-kubra, ed. Muhammad Ahmad Dahman (Damascus, Dar al-Fikr, 1984), 242–3. Isma‘il al-Mahasini, “Safahat min tarikh dimashq fi al-qarn al-hadi ‘ashar al-hijri mustakhraja min kunnash Isma‘il al-Mahasini,” ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid, Ma‘hid al-makhtutat al-‘arabiyya, 6(1960): 132–3. Ibid., 131. For another example, see Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi, Silk al-durar fi a‘yan al-qarn al-thani ‘ashar (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 1988), 1: 68. Ibn al-Siddiq, Ghara’ib al-bada’i‘ fi ‘aja’ib al-waqa’i‘, ed. Yusuf Nu‘aysa (Damascus: Dar al-Ma‘rifa, 1988), 46–7; Abd al-Karim Rafeq, The Province of Damascus, 1723–1783 (Beirut: Khayats, 1966), 265–7. Ibn Jum‘a, al-Bashat, 66–7; Rafeq, Province, 133. Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 146. Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 78–9. Ahmad al-Budayri, Hawadith dimashq al-yawmiyya, ed. Ahmad ‘Izzat ‘Abd al-Karim (Cairo: al-Jam‘iyya al-Misriyya li’l-Dirasat al-Tarikhiyya, 1959), 148. Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 53–64. See, for example, Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1:195, 245, 283, 2:123–4; Ibn Tulun, I‘lam, 174, 183, 252.

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18 See, for example, Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 126–7, 181–2, 219, 250–1, 258–60, 299, 2: 24; Ibn Tulun, I‘lam, 167–8. 19 See, for example, Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 27–8, 92–3, 179–82, 232, 247, 2: 7, 100. 20 Ibid., 2: 43. 21 See, for example, Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 56–7, 150, 411. For the survival of gangs into the early twentieth century, see Philip S. Khoury, “Syrian Urban Politics in Transition: The Quarters of Damascus during the French Mandate,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16(1984): 507–40. 22 André Raymond, Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane (Paris: Sindbad, 1985), 73. 23 Raymond, “Urban Networks,” 2: 220. 24 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 200–2; Rafeq, Province, 208–12. 25 Hasan Agha al-‘Abd, Tarikh Hasan Agha al-‘Abd, ed. Yusuf Nu‘aysa (Damascus: Wazarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi, 1979), 76–7. 26 Raymond, “Urban Networks,” 2: 221. 27 Hasan al-Burini, Tarajim al-a‘yan min abna’ al-zaman, ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Damascus: al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi bi-Dimashq, 1959), 2: 162–4; Muhammad al-Muhibbi, Khulasat al-athr fi a‘yan al-qarn al-hadi ‘ashar (Beirut: Dar Sadr, n.d.), 2: 77. 28 Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 279. 29 Ibid., 1: 303. 30 Ibn Tulun, I‘lam, 217. 31 Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 29. 32 Ibid., 1: 280. 33 Ibid., 1: 95. 34 Ibid., 1: 71; for another example of peasant protest in the city, see ibid., 1: 147. 35 Ibid., 1: 62. 36 Ibid., 1: 178. 37 Ibn Tulun, I‘lam, 198–9; idem, Mufakahat, 1: 299. 38 Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 153–4. 39 Al-Muhibbi, Khulasat, 4: 367. 40 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 49–50. 41 Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 136–8. 42 See, for example, Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 69–70; Ibn Tulun, Qudat dimashq: al-thaghr al-bassam fi man wuliya qada’ al-sham, ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Damascus: al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi bi-Dimashq, 1956), 96, 152. Some qadis (and other leading ulama) commanded the equivalent of their own gangs, which might even come to blows with one another on behalf of their patrons: see Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 113. 43 Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 160. 44 One cannot, for example, find a single reference to popular protest directed against judges in the history of Damascene judges compiled by Ibn Tulun, who also incorporated the work of an earlier author, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Nu‘aymi (d. 1520/1521). In his account, Qudat dimashq, Ibn Tulun lists all of the scholars who had ever served as chief judge for each of the four madhhabs in Damascus. His coverage is most thorough from the thirteenth century onward and can be taken as significant evidence for the different conception of this office that prevailed throughout the Mamluk period. The judiciary was certainly less bureaucratized in the thirteenth century than it would become under the Ottomans. On this earlier absence of an elaborate, formalized judicial hierarchy, see Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 39. 45 Muhammad Adnan Bakhit, The Ottoman Province of Damascus in the Sixteenth Century (Beirut: Libraire du Liban, 1982), 120. 46 Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 58–78.

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47 Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 2: 29–30. 48 It should be noted that the corruption bred by the fiscal turmoil of the late sixteenth century was not entirely new to the local religious establishment. Although most judges and deputies maintained honorable reputations, occasional scandals had erupted even during the first decades of Ottoman rule: see Bakhit, Ottoman Province, 125–8. 49 See, for example, Sharaf al-Din Musa ibn Yusuf al-Ansari, Nuzhat al-khatir wa bahjat al-nazir, ed. ‘Adnan Muhammad Ibrahim and ‘Adnan Darwish (Damascus: Wazarat al-Thaqafa, 1991), 2: 173–4, 179–80. 50 Al-Ansari, Nuzhat, 2: 193. 51 Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi, Lutf al-samar wa qatf al-thamr, ed. Mahmud al-Shaykh (Damascus: Wazarat al-Thaqafa, 1981), 2: 608–9; al-Muhibbi, Khulasat, 3: 356–7. 52 Al-Burini, Tarajim, 1: 86. 53 It should be pointed out that the main courthouse did not always occupy the same location. In the sixteenth century, it was known as Bab al-Efendi and probably functioned in the old Mamluk Palace of Justice (Dar al-‘Adl). By the early eighteenth century, the court had relocated to al-Mahkama al-Kubra, inside al-Madrasa al-Jawziyya in the neighborhood of al-Buzuriyya. In 1752/1753, it was transferred to nearby Mahkamat al-Bab, which stood opposite the now vanished madrasa of al-Nuriyya al-Kubra in the southwestern portion of the walled city. See, respectively, Bakhit, Ottoman Province, 120; al-Budayri, Hawadith, 64, 172, 178; Brigitte Marino, Le Faubourg du Midan à Damas àl’époque ottomane: espace urbain, société et habitat (1742–1830) (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1997), 32. 54 Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 130–1. 55 Ibid., 357. 56 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 127. 57 See the laments in ibid., 25, 48–9, 81–2, 197. 58 See, for example, Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 106; al-Budayri, Hawadith, 163. 59 See, for example, Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 389 (for a lieutenant governor who jointly toured the markets with the qadi); al-Budayri, Hawadith, 172, 197; Raslan al-Qari, “al-Wuzara’ aladhina hakamu dimashq,” in Wulat dimashq fi al-‘asr al-‘uthmani, ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Damascus, 1949), 77, 83; Mikha’il al-Dimashqi, Tarikh hawadith al-sham wa lubnan, aw tarikh Mikha’il al-Dimashqi, ed. Ahmad Ghassan Sabbanu (Damascus: Dar Qutayba, 1982), 59. 60 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 222. For another energetic qadi, see Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 331. 61 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 164. 62 Ibid., 52. 63 Ibid., 41. 64 Ibid., 63–4. The incident also earned a brief comment in the chronicle of Mikha’il Burayk, a Greek Orthodox priest, who saw it as an uprising of lawless soldiers (pl. zurbawat). See Mikha’il Burayk, Tarikh al-Sham, ed. Ahmad Ghassan Sabbanu (Damascus: Dar Qutayba, 1982), 27. It is another reminder of the difficulty in distinguishing popular protest from the actions of paramilitary contingents. 65 Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 65. 66 See, for example, Hasan Agha, Tarikh, 26, 40, 48. 67 Ibid., 101. 68 It should be emphasized that the increasing focus on the qadi did not mean that, by the eighteenth century, all crowds invariably had one target. Under certain circumstances, they might easily revert to older forms of action or single out other officials for punishment. After news reached the city about the destruction of the pilgrimage caravan in 1757, angry protesters sought out the lieutenant governor who had failed to come to its aid. The death of the feared and despised Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (1804), appointed several times as governor of Damascus, set loose a crowd that attacked and lynched a number of his local henchmen who had apparently served their patron too zealously.

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

81

82

83 84 85

To reiterate, the shift toward the qadi in the culture of protest should be understood as a highly pronounced trend, not an absolute transformation. For these protests, see, respectively, al-Budayri, Hawadith, 196–8; al-Dimashqi, Tarikh, 28–9. Charles Tilley, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 404. Baer, “Popular Revolt,” 234–5. Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 128–9. Ibn Tulun, I‘lam, 151; idem, Mufakahat, 1: 235. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 152–88. E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 50(1971): 76–136, repr. in idem, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 185–258. Al-Burini, Tarajim, 2: 3–5. This appeal to religious authorities probably drew on a much older tradition in which the people sought the consent of high-ranking ulama before launching uprisings. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we find qadis issuing declarations that legalized popular rebellions in cities throughout the Mamluk empire. The state recognized their culpability and as punishment sometimes fined them (along with other notables held responsible for maintaining civil order) once the clashes had subsided: see Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 151–3. Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 411–12. See also al-Budayri, Hawadith, 90, for the crowd that seized an old woman accused of casting spells and dragged her to the qadi. Submitting themselves to the authority of the court, they called for an investigation, which in the end secured her release. William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Al-Burini, Tarajim, 1: 85–6; al-Muhibbi, Khulasat, 1: 209. For the term ru‘a‘, see Ibn Tulun, Mufakahat, 1: 328–9; for ghawgha’, see ibid., 1: 9, 146, 166, 179, 180, 190–1, 194, 203–4, 217, 245, 260, 265, 278–80, 282–4, 337, 344, 2: 96, 99, 103, 110, 116; and for zu‘ar, which was practically standard terminology for gangs, see ibid., 1: 92, 110, 153, 166, 176–7, 179–83, 185, 191, 194–7, 202–4, 207, 212–13, 219–21, 227, 232, 238, 245, 247, 251–2, 259–60, 262, 268–70, 279–81, 283, 286–7, 293, 295, 299–300, 314–16, 330–2, 2: 24, 27, 42–3, 58, 62, 98, 101, 105. See also Lapidus, Muslim Cities, 154. Ibn Kannan, Yawmiyat, 516. Among other references in his chronicle are a cutting poem about Ottoman soldiers, an unflattering portrait of a neighborhood gang leader in al-Salihiyya, and jubilant condemnation of the imperial janissaries on their expulsion from the city in 1740 (a new detachment would be summoned back six years later). See, respectively, ibid., 214, 411, 519. Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 67–8, 77. See also his remarks in ibid., 62, 66. Another author who had disparaging comments for the local soldiery was al-Muradi, who blamed the “rabble of the janissaries” (ru‘a‘al-ujaqat al-yarliyya wa al-qabiqul ) for the disturbances that tore apart the city in 1757–1758: see al-Muradi, Silk, 2: 61. For a discussion of these events, see Rafeq, Province, 166–9. Al-Muradi also uses the term ru‘a‘ for the janissaries who staged an uprising (1703/1704) against ‘Abdullah al-Jarkasi (his maternal great-grandfather), who was the commander of the yerliyya at the time: see al-Muradi, Silk, 3: 90. See, for example, al-Budayri, Hawadith, 19, 51, 77; for similar language, see ibid., 18, 87–8, 118. For other harsh language directed at the janissaries, see Ibn Jum‘a, al-Bashat, 68. Al-Budayri, Hawadith, 63–4. Ehud R. Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites (1700–1900): A Framework for Research,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from

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Within, ed. Ilan Pappé and Moshe Ma’oz (New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), 154. Toledano actually highlights two processes that he sees as key developments by the eighteenth century. As mentioned, one was the “Ottomanization” of local notables, who increasingly identified themselves with the Ottoman political order. The other, he maintains, was the progressive “localization” of officials and soldiers – above all, members of the janissary corps – who took up positions in the provinces, struck roots in local society, and became permanent fixtures in urban politics. 86 On the subject of popular protest, preliminary research already hints at this regional diversity. In eighteenth-century Aleppo, popular protests most often singled out the qadi as their target, holding him responsible, like their Damascene contemporaries, for manipulation of prices and food stocks. In eighteenth-century Cairo, however, crowds seem to have followed patterns that, by Damascene standards, were more typical of the late-Mamluk period. Although rioters in 1711 sought out the courthouse as their first objective, most demonstrations continued to mobilize around al-Azhar, the city’s main mosque, and to organize marches to the governor’s residence. To explain these divergences, future research may need to explore the balance of power among the governor, qadi, and local notables, which could have shaped popular perceptions in different ways. See, respectively, Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 100, 116, 124; Baer, “Popular Revolt”; and Raymond, “Quartiers.” The author owes the reference to the disturbances of 1711 to Barbara Flemming, “The Story of the Cairene ‘Fitna’ of 1711,” presentation delivered at Leiden University, January 26, 2002.

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2 WOMEN AND POPULAR PROTEST Women’s demonstrations in nineteenth-century Iran Vanessa Martin

In the Iranian Revolution of 1979 one of the most notable features was that of political demonstrations by women in large groups.1 At the time such separation of the sexes seemed to be an Islamized form of the organized mass demonstrations of a Marxist–Leninist kind which had been a feature of twentieth-century politics. In addition, the demonstrations seemed to indicate a growing consciousness of women’s role in the political arena, particularly as a result of new style modern organizations and societies. Yet, whilst it is true that twentieth-century Western methods of organization had an influence on the Islamist movement of 1962–1979, it is evident that separate women’s political demonstrations were a much older characteristic of Iranian politics. There is in particular one wellknown reference in the Tarikh-i bidari-yi Iranian to such a demonstration during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when a group of women attacked the Shah’s carriage whilst the ‘ulama were in bast in Shah ‘Abd al-’Azim.2 The Revolution was characterized by other demonstrations by women either as a separate group or in collaboration with men.3 More recently photographs have come to light showing women as an organized presence.4 Afary has demonstrated how the roots of modern Iranian feminism were firmly established in the Constitutional Revolution, and shown how women protesters were part of the new movement from its earliest beginnings.5 This chapter raises the possibility that ordinary women were involved in open political activity much earlier, with motives that were probably mixed and not necessarily of a secular influence. In a word, women’s demonstrations have a history going right back into the nineteenth century, and possibly before.6 It must, however, first be noted, that it was very unusual for women to demonstrate as a distinct group before the twentieth century. It was certainly not common in other countries of the Middle East or the Subcontinent, though examples can be found, for instance in Aleppo in 1751, when women occupied the minaret of the Great Mosque;7 and in 1804 in Egypt, when women stoned soldiers from the top

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of barricades.8 It was not particularly a feature of the politics of Europe, though there are examples during the French Revolution.9 Foreign observers in Iran commented that demonstrations in which women played a prominent part were characteristic of Iran.10 There is therefore a question as to why these demonstrations occurred in Iran, and where and how they originated. After some introductory remarks on women in the nineteenth century, this chapter will set out and examine the evidence on the demonstrations, bearing in mind that it is scanty, as with so much at the popular level in Iran before the twentieth century.11 In Qajar Iran women were at a definite disadvantage compared to men. In a study of society in Tehran in 1269/1852–3, Ettehadieh notes that 1 per cent of women at most owned houses, and the percentage who owned shops was even smaller.12 Daughters received half their brother’s share of inheritance, and a woman without children a quarter of her husband’s estate, whilst one with children inherited an eighth. The Islamic concept of hijab, decorum in dress, was strictly observed in the urban areas. In the street Iranian women were wrapped in dull looking veils, and though elite women were richly dressed indoors, out of doors they were attired similarly to those of other social groups.13 Women’s outdoor costume consisted of a dark blue mantle covering the head and shoulders, falling to their knees, and a white veil sewn onto the mantle at the forehead, but loose below. They wore very wide trousers (also dark blue), socks and slippers.14 One of the principal ways of punishing women was to turn them outside of private space uncovered, as happened to the wives of the servants of the karguzar (Foreign Agent) of Bushire, when he failed to pay the arrears of customs dues.15 The seclusion of women created problems in the treating of illness, and for example, impeded vaccination. In Bushire in 1884 it was proposed to overcome this problem by training Iranian women to carry out the vaccinations.16 Yet, despite the veiling to all but close relations, in marriage the groom was often allowed a glimpse first.17 The women of parts of the country, especially Gilan, had more freedom of dress, as they rarely veiled their faces, and often tucked their garments thigh high when weeding and cutting the rice.18 The tribal women of Fars were unveiled.19 In marriage women gained in respect if they had children, but if childless were looked upon as a burden.20 According to Mounsey, looks alone kept the husband’s affection, but Binning states that, contrary to European impressions of non-European men, husbands often consulted their wives and took their advice on all kinds of matters, and were not infrequently ruled by their wives.21 Much of their lives was spent on the demanding Persian cuisine, fostered by the Shi‘i tendency towards the seclusion of women, combined with the new ingredients brought by international trade.22 Many women, however, complained of unfair treatment as women, for example, being less well-treated than a second wife, of being thrown out of the house, but refused divorce; on the other hand, divorced men complained that their wives had taken their property.23 Of course, it would depend on the family and to some extent also on the social milieu. 51

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Women could use the legal system to their advantage and exercise agency in the process, not unusually winning cases. In the courts of law the mujtahid might well interpret the law in a way which worked for women.24 Women were also determined in exercising agency, and in standing up for their rights. Magistrates’ courts, which were held publicily as a means of ensuring a check on thier proceedings, were sometimes tumultuous. The women who attended could be the most vociferous, and the minor officials who were present to preserve order were not permitted to quell them with the blows they inflicted on the men.25 Although the shari‘a was followed with regard to women’s personal status, so was customary practice, particularly that of ensuring that a woman did not dishonour her family. Generally, officials took little notice of the ill-treatment or murder of a woman found in adultery, and her own family could connive in her demise.26 In one incident a man and a woman were brought before a local so-called ‘dervish prince’ and tried for fornication. The man was killed and the woman put in a sack and beaten, but saved by a passer by.27 In 1859 a pregnant woman was put to death for poisoning her husband, though the execution was considered contrary to the shari‘a, which ordains that not only must a pregnant woman give birth, but also feed her child to the appropriate time of weaning.28 Punishment for prostitution could be equally barbarous. In Rasht a woman suspected of prostitution with a Russian, was seized and taken to the local mujtahid, who inflicted 100 blows on her with his own hands.29 As was not uncommon at that time, the mujtahid then used the incident of female sexual transgression to incite the population against the foreign presence in Iran, in effect using her as a pawn in the politics of religion and state.30 Few people in Iran in the nineteenth century were educated, the literacy rate being about 5 per cent, and the rate among women was lower, though possibly not as low as is sometimes suggested. The women of the poorer social groups, that is to say the majority, were uneducated. With regard to the better off, Mounsey emphasizes that women were mostly uneducated and had to rely on their looks to keep their husbands affections, whereas Wills speaks of their being educated even in the middle classes (presumably among merchants and some members of the guilds). According to Watson girls, presumably from the middle social groups, were allowed to attend a mullah’s class up to the age of seven, after which their education became the responsibility of a learned woman. They could read, write, including compose poems, play music, and sew, but their education was necessarily narrow. Women of the families of the senior ‘ulama were often educated to some extent, Bibi ‘Alam Khurasani, for example, learning the Islamic sciences from her father, and fiqh, usul and hadith from her husband. Otherwise, children of the well-off were taught at home by tutors.31 Many women worked and could gain some property through engagement in small trades, such as that of pawnbroker.32 A Jewish woman, called Muravarid (the Pearl) was a vendor of jewels and shawls to women of the elite and thus had a certain influence in high places, which she was at one time able to exercise on 52

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behalf of the Jewish community of Hamadan.33 Women were involved in the slave trade and one named Mulla Mariam assisted in landing slaves in Bushire in 1877.34 It is possible she had contacts with the local harems. Much of the slave trade in Mohammareh in 1853 was managed by a female in the harem of the Shaikh, who had his entire confidence.35 Sometimes a woman could keep a school for younger children, as in the example mentioned by Eastwick of two elderly Muslim women managing a school in Tehran.36 Women could also be used as emissaries in a dispute, as when Saham al-Mulk, Governor of the Baharlu, and some of the Arab tribes, put down a rebellion headed by Reza Khan, and the latter’s brother sent a woman to the Saham imploring that a pardon be granted for the tribal rebels.37 Employed in the carpet trade, in companies such as Ziegler’s, where there were four women to a loom, they were paid very low wages, but could also be quite enterprising. Since they worked at home where the foreign merchants in particular could not enter without prior notice, they stole the designs, kept them hidden, and sold them to Iranian merchants.38 In the early part of the nineteenth century exceptionally high taxes were paid by female dancers and by ‘votaries of pleasure’ (presumably prostitutes).39 They followed their professions under the immediate supervision of the governor, and their names and ages were carefully registered. If one died or married, another took her place. They were also divided into groups according to their merits and the regard in which they were held by their clients. Each group lived in a separate street, and their prices descended from 2 tomans to small change (pul-i siah). Most women in work, however, were servants, and in the late nineteenth century received the lowly wage of 3 tomans a year, although the more senior ones were paid more.40 Wives usually went into service, unless they had children, or else they undertook the making, mending, and washing of clothes.41 Other jobs included teacher of small children, midwife, and bathhouse attendant,42 as well as spinning, carpet weaving, textile weaving and embroidery.43 There is some evidence that women, but not necessarily those who worked, had increased wealth by the end of the nineteenth century.44 The existing evidence does not permit us to say wheather there was much change as between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in terms of opportnities for women to come out of the house. Generally, women’s movements were very much watched and controlled, and for security reasons they did not go out after dark.45 Many religious ceremonies, for example rauzeh khani and Umar kushi, took place in the house. However, trips to the bazaar, attendance at the mosque, and visits to family provided them with the chance to go into public space.46 One observer noted that old women of the lower social groups were the only ones seen in the city.47 However in 1807, another remarked that how the curiosity of the women in the house adjoining the one he lived in allowed him to see and talk to them, which their husbands did not mind.48 In the mid-century, women were depicted as coming into public space regularly. Mounsey describes the bazaars as crowded with men, women and beasts, and also does not specify that the woman were old.49 Binning noted that the women of the urban lower 53

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social groups and the villages had little scruple in talking to a stranger, and many of the middle levels were not as shy as might be supposed.50 The mother and sister of his landlord in Shiraz often came to his quarters to talk to him, and put aside their veils. When he walked on the roof of the house the women in the neighbouring house came to stare at him, and were not particular about hiding their faces when no one else was observing (though, of course, they were still in their own homes). In his observation women were free to go to friends, family, bathhouse, mosque and bazaar, and to receive visitors. He contrasts their behaviour with that of women of rank, who were always closely veiled and guarded by attendants.51 Indeed, the behaviour of women in a notable household could, at least in theory be rigidly controlled. Gurney has drawn attention to one notable’s attempt to ensure his household retained its good reputation during a period of his absence,52 but it cannot be certain how far he was successful, and given some of the evidence above, it seems likely that the reality did not match his ideal. There were other pubic occasions when women came out of the house. For example in Rasht, at least, during a marriage procession, a dense crowd of female friends and relations lined the left side of the street.53 Finally, we must bear in mind that there were difference as to time and place. In the engagement of women in politics, which we are to study, there was an element of drama, and this extended not only to urban women. When Husain Khan Galidar was killed in an ambush, his widow sent her veil through the Dashti district calling on his tribe to avenge his death, which immediately attracted 2,000–3,000 volunteers.54 In 1908 Sartip Muhammad ‘Ali, former chief of the Kalkhur tribe was abducted by a rival in Kermanshah on his way back from the mosque. The Sartip’s womenfolk went at once to the mosque, and, throwing dust on their heads and rendering their garments, appealed to the Governor and all the chief mujtahids to have him restored.55 The people of the town then generated a frenzy of religious outrage, and brought pressure on the mujtahids to complain, so that the Governor had to take action. In reporting on women’s petitions submitted to the Shah in the 1880s, Schneider points out that they showed a considerable self-confidence, and that they constituted a surprisingly high proportion of the whole.56 Women were primarily responsible for managing food and sustenance, so they became most notably militant at the time of bread shortages. Political demonstrations by women in the urban areas were often ostensibly bread riots, and therefore so termed. However, they usually represented a deeper malaise resulting mostly from wider economic difficulties affecting the community as a whole. Sometimes the latter resulted from plague or famine, sometimes from a downturn in the local economy, and sometimes from mismanagement by the authorities, who could well exacerbate existing problems by hoarding grain. Thus revolts by the wider community would not unusually start with a women’s protest or bread riot, and then spread to involve the whole bazaar network, including the merchants providing the wealth, the ‘ulama the moral leadership and intercession with the state, the men from the poorer quarters the military might, and the guilds organisation and facilitation. 54

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The earliest references to women’s bread riots date from the mid-nineteenth century, but the British diplomatic sources which provide the most detailed evidence are comparatively scarce before that time, so we cannot be sure that such women’s bread riots did not take place in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, though they may not have been as frequent. An early recorded example of women’s riots took place in Tehran in 1849. At the hour of prayer a number of women from Isfahan created a disturbance in the main mosque of the city, and demanded that the Imam Jum’a intervene to prevent the sacking of Isfahan where there had been turbulence.57 The women, having initiated the demonstration, were then joined by men, and the crowd grew to 2,000. They pulled the Imam Jum’a out of the pulpit with the intention of obliging him to go to the Shah’s palace to demand justice. The Imam Jum’a, who had no control over the situation, eventually escaped to his house and the crowd dispersed. This demonstration, not specifically related to bread, would seem to have been part of broader objections to government policy, and was clearly, like most of the other demonstrations, organized and premeditated. Tehran was again the scene of a riot in 1861, when the Shah returned from the hunt to be greeted by a large crowd, which included many women, and some men, amongst them members of the ‘ulama.58 Ostensibly, the crowd was not hostile to the Shah personally, and whilst the women pleaded for assistance, members of the ‘ulama reminded him of the precepts which enjoined beneficence. Another demonstration the next day included men, who criticized the Shah in person. The demonstration led to the execution of the kalantar (mayor), Muhammad Khan, accompanied by orders that the price of bread be dropped. A major demonstration involving women took place in Shiraz in 1865, when a crowd of tribal and city women went to the arsenal at the foot of the telegraph wire and complained that the Governor, Qavam al-Dauleh, cared nothing for the people, except to take their gifts. They cited the insecurity of the city and the dearness of bread as the principal evidence of his inadequacies.59 The Governor sent an official with some farashes to drive away the women, at which the bazaars closed, evidently in support, and the area round the Maidan-i Vakil (Vakil Square) became filled with women, men, lutis and country people. A senior government official went to the Maidan of the Arsenal to try and subdue the people, but they pelted him with stones and he fled. The people were only eventually quietened by the dismissal of the Governor. At the time of the famine of 1871, when bread was scarce and provisions expensive, the women of Tehran became so aggressive that the troops in the royal camp were put under arms.60 Indeed the women who took part in all these demonstrations were notably assertive. Women were thus equally determined in Shiraz in 1878, when a crowd of them, again protesting at the price of bread, pulled the Beglerbegi from off his horse.61 Indeed one of the advantages women had was that, when protesting against powerful officials, their veils protected them from individual recognition, so that they could be more intimidating.62 The Mayor of Shiraz, Qavam al-Mulk, was the recipient of invective on the subject of 55

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bread, when in 1885, two women suddenly positioned themselves in front of his horse complaining of high prices. When they cursed him, they were removed to prison, at which the bazaars promptly closed and a demonstration of women, children and men followed. Lutis also involved were arrested but there followed two or three days when bread was plentiful.63 In 1893 the Governor of Shiraz, Sa‘d al-Mulk, tried to abolish the right of taking sanctuary in holy places. A preacher in the Jami’ Mosque was to announce the changes, but when he rose to speak, so did a group of women and other objectors, who abused the Imam Jum’a saying that first some arrangement should be made about the price of bread.64 This would appear to have been the role of the women in expressing popular discontent at the abolition of sanctuary, particularly under an arbitrary regime. The meeting broke up to prevent a riot, but none of the other ‘ulama accepted the new regulations. There were also demonstrations in Isfahan over the price of bread in 1893. The people, chiefly women, crowded into the Shah Mosque and would not allow the prayer leader, Aqa Najafi, to say prayers, on the grounds that he was one of the causes of the raised prices. They prevented him from going to his own house, and obliged him to accompany them to see the Governor, Zill al-Sultan, of whom he then demanded a deduction in the price in no uncertain terms.65 The price of bread again became high in Isfahan in April 1894, and there was grumbling among the women of the city at the cost of sugar, bread, mutton and lamp oil.66 The Governor, Zill al-Sultan felt unable to punish the women for their agitation (no doubt because it would provoke further disorders). However, a few women, who carried off a small amount of sugar from the confectioners were punished by being obliged to pay compensation. Later, on 24 April, about 40 women and 200 children went to the mosque of Shaikh Muhammad ‘Ali and verbally abused him. They then proceeded to the bazaars and began to remove items from the shops, at which they had to be driven away by the authorities. Fuel, as well as bread, could be the cause of an organized women’s demonstration, as in Shiraz in 1894, when about 40 women took sanctuary in the prince Governor’s stables complaining of the lack of fuel.67 Another type of disaster which could bring on a demonstration was disease, and the hardship it caused. In Astarabad in 1895, at the time of a cholera epidemic, the blame fell on the Russians and the sale of wine in the town itself associated with foreigners. Women took bast in the Russian consulate as a means of protest, and the shops of Russian subjects were attacked.68 This demonstration was said, with some reason, to have been specifically incited by the ‘ulama, but it would be a mistake to see other women’s actions as having been specifically instigated, rather than part of a communal response, or representing the preoccupation of the women themselves, as some sources tend to do. Similarly, in a period of grain shortage and government weakness in Ardebil, a group of women encouraged by mujtahid, came out with stones carried in chadurs tied round their waists, and attacked the castle where the governor was residing. He had to order his forces to fire on the crowd to disperse them.69 However, it would be a mistake 56

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to see other women’s actions, as having been specifically instigated, rather than as part of a communal response, or as representing the preoccupations of the women themselves. Even in Bushire, where riots were rare because of the British preoccuption with order, and the Iranian government’s anxieties over the British presence, women’s demonstrations occurred. In March 1897 the house of the Head of the (British run) Post Office in Bushire was stoned by a crowd of women, who had to be removed from the town, imprisoned or severely punished before the matter would settle.70 No doubt there was an anti foreign element in the women’s protest. Two demonstrations, however, stand out as being exceptionally unusual for their sophistication in terms of expression and organization, which at certain points carry an element of choreography. One of them is the earliest nineteenth-century example so far to come to light. A woman’s demonstration formed part of a popular uprising in Isfahan in 1840 so serious that it brought the Shah in person to the city. At this time Isfahan was dominated by lutis, which is perhaps a testimony to economic problems and unemployment. Certainly, there seems to have been struggles between different social groups with merchants being subjected to constant robbery by lutis, who were then protected by some of the principal mujtahids, especially Haj Sayyid Muhammad Baqir, and his son.71 The disorder became so great that the Shah marched to Isfahan with a force of thirty guns and fourteen corps of infantry, a most unusual event which was to remain for some time in the popular memory. On his arrival on 27 February 1840, he and his court were for twelve days the guests of Sayyid Muhammad Baqir, which in reality constituted punishment by major fine. Four hundred lutis were seized, executed or otherwise punished, and the mujtahid’s son was sent to Kerbala.72 The Shah, however, had some difficulty in persuading Muhammad Baqir and another mujtahid, Sayyid Ibrahim Karbasi, to go to Kerbala as well.73 When Muhammad Baghir finally announced he was going to Kerbala, a crowd of 7–8,000 came to his house and begged him not to leave, declaring themselves ready for martyrdom.74 Two to three thousand women, having gathered together, went to the artillery quarters in the Maidan-i Shah, where they began to weep and wail. The Shah came onto the balcony of the Ali Qapu, where he was residing, and asked what they wanted. They answered that as their husbands had not the courage to wait upon His Majesty, they had done so, and their prayer was that he would put all of them to death rather than permit the head of their religion to leave the city.75 The Shah replied that he could not possible prevent the Sayyid fulfilling a religious duty, namely a pilgrimage to the tomb of his ancestors. A crowd of both men and women then went to the Sayyid’s house and would not allow him to leave it. The Shah did not punish them. In the event the mujtahid prevailed and remained in Isfahan. After the Shah left, to the annoyance of the more propertied section of the populace, he protected a well-known luti and vagabond, who had taken refuge in his quarter, and when the latter was finally arrested, the mujtahid had him released on the grounds of repentance.76 The Shah had evidently curbed the worst of the disorder, but he could not eradicate it without resolving the underlying economic problems. 57

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The second demonstration, a major event, took place in May 1893 in Shiraz. It brought about the fall of Qavam al-Mulk, kalantar (mayor) of Shiraz, about whom the people of the city went to the telegraph office to complain to the Shah.77 The people showed unanimity in refusing to accept Qavam’s promises of better living conditions, and in demanding that he be sent away from Shiraz. This solidarity continued even under attack on the orders of the Shah, and they were supported by the ‘ulama who refused to go and advise the people to disperse, when asked to do so by the Governor of Shiraz. Although the people were armed, and had been joined by riflemen, they showed no sign of violent hostility and did not use their arms.78 During the demonstration the people occupied the telegraph office of Shiraz and telegrammed the Shah concerning the price of bread, but nothing was touched.79 But most remarkable of all was the role of the women in this demonstration. They led a procession, comprised of an immense crowd, to the telegraph office to make the initial complaint.80 On 15 May a band of women also collected all the Jews in Shiraz, and making them bring their copies of the Talmud, induced them to join the crowd, by whom they were cordially welcomed. On 15 May, the crowd now numbering 15,000–20,000 men and women brought their holiest objects, the banner of Husain and the hand of ‘Abbas and remained beating their breasts and weeping, and crying ‘Ya Husain’. While it is difficult to produce any direct proof it would seem possible that these demonstrations are in some way linked to ta‘ziyya plays. These re-enact the drama of the seventh-century battle of Kerbala when the Prophet’s grandson, Husain, the third Imam of the Shi‘a, was martyred in a struggle for justice against the army of the ‘Ummayad Caliph Mu‘awiyya who had usurped his position. During the struggle a number of the Prophet’s family were killed. Present at the scene of battle were his granddaughter, Zainab – the aunt of Husain, and Fatima, his daughter and the wife of his nephew, Qasim. Thus, in this passion play, women had a role in the actual field of struggle, although they did not themselves fight. They supported the men who went into battle, tried to prevent them from going to certain death, and wept at their departure, but accepted in the end that they must make any sacrifice necessary for the cause. Although women in the urban demonstrations were more assertive than the women at Kerbala, and were occasionally beaten, death and brutality were suffered by the men to whom they acted mainly as a support. There are therefore distinct parallels between the demonstrations and the ta‘ziyya plays. This is not to argue that the demonstrations derive from the ta‘ziyya, plays but rather that they emerge from a common culture and are also a reflection of social, political and cultural trends in the nineteenth-century and perhaps even earlier. To understand this background further it is necessary to consider very briefly the history of the ta‘ziyya plays. Ta‘ziyya emerges from a sense of community and collaboration being an expression of unity. It strengthens the feeling of community.81 Ta‘ziyya was also a means for the people of finding a common solace in the face of a political system that was arbitrary and oppressive. It enabled them to endure the often 58

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intolerable hardships of arbitrary government, and to find, from the examples of the tribulations of the Imams, the inner strength to withstand them and struggle against them as a community. Ta‘ziyya emerged in the Qajar period when many takiyyas were built and people attended in their thousands.82 Historians have dated the beginnings of ta‘ziyya to the Safavid period, but at that time they were not what could properly be called plays, as references from the Safavid period speak of processions but not of play performances.83 In the first decades of the seventeenth-century Muharram ceremonial ritual developed in most urban centres, and by the mid-century there was some semblance of enactment, but without any spoken role.84 Chelkowski argues that ta‘ziyya as ritual theatre arose from a fusion in the mid-eighteenth century of two traditions of performance of the rites of ‘Ashura, the one peripatetic and the other local.85 As between the Zand period and the time of Fath ‘Ali Shah there was a significant rise in both the number of performances of ta‘ziyya and in the versions used, subsidiary stories being developed from the main narrative.86 By the nineteenth-century ta‘ziyyas had acquired special structures for their enactment, called takiyyas and later also Husainiyyas.87 The earliest permanent building was recorded by Masse in Astarabad in 1786.88 From the late eighteenth century, foreign travellers such as Franklin, 1787, and Drouville, travelling 1812–1813, provide descriptions of actual ta‘ziyya plays, Drouville mentioning that parts were given in the battle of Kerbala, and that 4,000 people became involved, but astonishingly none of them were wounded.89 By 1840 ta‘ziyyas were being written in poetry, and in the mid-1830s Kuzov saw a complete recreation of the death of Imam Husain in which all the details of the events were faithfully re-enacted.90 Certainly by the early nineteenth-century ta‘ziyyas had female roles, although the female parts were always played by men or boys. The male actors were dressed in baggy black garments covering them from head to foot, with veils to hide their faces.91 Thus Franklin mentions the tragically fated marriage of the son of Imam Hasan with the daughter of Imam Husain, who was surrounded by the women of the family. When her husband goes into the field of battle, the young wife most eloquently expresses her unhappiness.92 At a performance in Zanjan in 1862 the brothers and sisters of ‘Ali Akbar were killed by Yazid.93 When ‘Ali Akbar decided to go into battle, his mother fainted, but on recovering expressed the wish that her son be lion-hearted and prayed for his well-being.94 Ta‘ziyya was significant in demonstrating the heroism and courage of women, who expressed their feelings as mothers sisters and wives, and their willingness to struggle in the service of their religion. In one ta‘ziyya the mother of Qasim goes with great emotion to the Imam and asks if he would give permission for her son to partake in jihad.95 Ta‘ziyya, however, underwent its most pronounced development as a result of royal patronage, and that of the notables. It seems partly to have been a form of religious entertainment and partly a means of creating a bond of identification with the common people.96 This movement developed from the time of Aqa Muhammad Qajar, and gradually encouraged the ‘ulama to accept it, despite their doubts about its religious validity.97 Early in the reign of Fath ‘Ali Shah, one of 59

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the greatest mujtahids of the time, Mirza Abu’l Qasim known as Fazil Qumi (d.1231/1815) issued a fatva declaring that playing a part (shabiyya khani) was not forbidden but permissible.98 Ouseley describes a ta‘ziyya in the square of the Shah’s palace, and remarks that it had more valuable decoration than probably ever graced a European theatre performance, for the Shah had lent a large quantity of his jewels for the production. When Husain resolved to go and rescue ‘Abbas, his sister Zainab and daughter Sakina tried with their tears and entreaties and foreboding to dissuade him.99 Ta‘ziyya spread further during the reign of Muhammad Shah. Hajji Mirza Aqasi, his powerful Prime Minister, had his own takiyya.100 A farman of Muhammad Shah’s reign, later confirmed by Nasir al-Din Shah, commands that all of the landowners of Kushak village near Shiraz must pay for the village ta‘ziyya as part of the village tax responsibilities.101 By 1843 numerous ta‘ziyyas with different scripts were performed in Tehran.102 The greatest patron of ta‘ziyya was Nasir al-Din Shah, who inaugurated an official takiyya, known as the Takiyya-yi Daulat, in 1856, there having been, however, performances under court patronage earlier in his reign.103 Following a visit to Europe in 1873, during which he attended a performance at the Albert Hall, London, he constructed a new government takiyya, an immense, circular building, with space for 20–30,000 persons.104 Women had a prominent role as, for example, during one ta‘ziyya there was a dialogue between Zainab and Husain in which they spoke of their sad destiny, and Zainab flung herself to the floor and poured dust on her head.105 There were more than fifty takiyyas in Tehran alone in the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah, and takiyyas became a major feature of Iranian towns and villages.106 Their founders were not only notables, but members of guilds, for example the goldsmiths, or communities from the provinces, for example Azerbaijan. The interior was sometimes gorgeous. The patron of each takiyya ensured, for the sake of his own reputation, that the interior be suitably maintained. The royal takiyya was financed by the Shah but he bestowed upon the leading merchants in Tehran the honour of keeping up its decoration. In Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, under the influence of the European theatrical tradition, ta‘ziyyas in the royal takiyya divided between those of which the purport was mainly religious, and those from ancillary or other stories of religious origin which had an element of popular entertainment. I‘timad al-Saltana mentions that when he went to the ta‘ziyya of Bilqais and Sulaiman, the bride of Sulaiman, Zainat, was riding an elephant, and when they wanted to bring her down, the elephant shied away, and then bolted, still carrying the bride, to the merriment of the observers.107 Sometimes ta‘ziyyas were performed just for women, for example in the house of Qamar al-Saltana, the daughter of Fath ‘Ali Shah, the audience, and exceptionally in ta‘ziyyas, all the players were women.108 Women’s ta‘ziyyas were closed to men, and those who held them gained the title of mulla (person of pious learning).109 Religious or not particularly so, ta‘ziyyas provided new opportunities for women to go out and about, to contact other people and to witness different forms 60

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of expression. They were thus important in drawing women out of their limited existence in the home and enlarging their experience. Ta‘ziyyas thus had an enthusiastic female audience. Ouseley describes how the walls of the takiyya square in the palace in Tehran were covered in hundreds of women wearing white chadurs.110 At one performance in Zanjan, women sat on the right and men opposite.111 In the government takiyya in Tehran the major part of the audience were women, who sat cross-legged on the floor in the centre, which was allocated as their particular space.112 By the latter part of the nineteenth century the female characters had acquired their own ta‘ziyyas, there being for example, the story of the death of Fatima Zahra, and the martyrdom of the wife of Shimr (who become an adherent of the family of Husain).113

Conclusion The women’s popular demonstrations described above varied in their purpose, but were mostly political by implication, specifically in being critical of government economic policy. They were not, on the whole, spontaneous or chance eruptions, but demonstrations that were organized by a community in which women were given a specific role. The political culture of these demonstrations is peculiarly Iranian. With the more sophisticated demonstrations the women’s role appears almost choreographed, and even with the simpler ones there is evidence of organization, and I would not argue that this feature of Iranian culture would necessarily be new. The role of women in the ta‘ziyya plays places them unusually on the battlefield of the political struggle itself, by contrast with depiction of women as peaceful and resigned in the Christian tradition. The Shi’i women do not actually fight and die but have strong role in support and communal empathy. Yet it cannot be said that these demonstrations are an extension of the ta‘ziyya, but rather that the more premeditated ones are part of a development that gives political expression a new form. The major demonstrations of 1840 and 1893, in particular, show that ordinary women had a valued role in politics as part of the community in the nineteenth century, yet they have come to light through largely chance mention in the more obscure contemporary documents of the British archives. As far as I have been able to investigate Persian documents describing the same events from a later perspective fail to mention them. This is an example to support the case that women’s role in history can easily be overlooked. That there were such demonstrations in the earlier part of the nineteenth century demonstrates a more traditional element, yet the slight evidence also raises the possibility, which needs further investigation that women were becoming better educated, better off and better organized by the final two decades of the period. That raises the so far unanswerable question of the degree of influence of modern organiszation, and Western forms of expression, on traditional Iranian culture. Further it demonstrates that there were older roots to the role of women in both the constitutional and the Islamic revolutions. 61

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Notes 1 I am most grateful for Dr ‘Ali Bulookbashi, Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Dr Sarah Ansari for the contribution their comments have made to this chapter. 2 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Mirza Muhammad, Tarikh-i bidari-yi Iranian, Tehran 1357/1978–1979, I, p. 361. 3 See, for example, A. Kasravi, Tarikh-i mashruta-yi Iran, Tehran 2536/1977–1988, pp. 53, 57, 66, 101; J. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Columbia 1996, pp. 177–208. 4 A photograph taken during the disturbances of 1906 shows women participating in the political action as an organised group. M. Haqani, ‘Nahzat-i mashrutiyyat bih ravaiyat-i tasvir’, Tarikh-i Mu’asir-i Iran, No. 18, p. 266. 5 Afary, Revolution, p. 177. She quotes Morgan Shuster saying, in The Strangling of Persia: ‘The veiled women of Iran, who with little or no experience had overnight become teachers, newspaper writers, founders of women’s clubs, (and) speakers on political subjects.’ 6 There is at least one example from the Safavid period. Interview with Dr M. Sefatgol, professor of Safavid History, Tehran University, 19.11.2002. 7 A. Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity, New York 1989, p. 100. 8 J.E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Cambridge 1985, pp. 141–2. 9 See D.G. Levy, H.B. Applewhite and M.D. Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris, Illinois 1980, p. 15; D. Godineau, The Women of Paris and the French Revolution, trans. K. Streip, Berkeley, CA,1988, pp. 98–9. 10 No.18, 20 December 1849, FO 60/146. 11 This chapter concentrates on women in urban society. However, they also appear to have had a role in conflict in country society, as happened at the slaughter of a government army, sent to suppress a revolt in Neriz. The Neriz women clambered onto surrounding rocks, and clapping their mouths with their hands, gave out cries of exultation. More government troops followed, this time with success. The men were killed and the women brought to Shiraz, where some were distributed to the soldiery and others were left to beg on the streets. Enclosure in No. 350 18 November 1853, and No. 381 15 December 1853, FO 248/150. In the villages likewise, the women joined the men in battle. On his way to Hamadan, Alcock found that, due to the harsh conduct of Iranian officials, his party encountered villagers instantly armed, with the women being active in providing stakes and weapons for the men. T. Alcock, Travels in Russia, Persia, Turkey and Greece in 1828–9, London, 1831, p. 77. 12 M. Ettehadieh, Inja Tehran ast, Tehran, 1377, p. 261. 13 Enclosure in No. 17, 5 February 1862, FO 60/266. 14 A. Mounsey, Journey through the Caucasus and the Interior of Persia, London 1872. 15 Encl. in No. 135, 7 December 1887, FO 248/448. 16 Annual Medical Report, Bushire, p. 8, 17 April 1884, FO 248/300. 17 C.J. Wills, Persia as It Is, London,1886, p. 55. 18 Encl. p. 195, No. 16, 10 April 1860, FO 248/191. 19 Encl. p. 195, No. 18, 25 January 1982, FO 60/444. Women were not necessarily as decorous and modest as some sources would suggest. Wills describes being in the house of a notable when two young ladies entered in ‘becoming if slightly indelicate dress’ with feet and legs bare, and skirts such as were seen in ballets. They asked him to examine their tongues and throat, and the eunuch could not control them. Then, together with the eunuch and a young black female servant, they partook of tea with shrieks of laughter, but all three women immediately rushed to cover their faces when the master of the house appeared. C.J. Wills, In the Land of the Lion and the Sun,

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

London, 1883, p. 40. He further describes them as giving an occasional glimpse of their ‘charms’ to passers-by, Wills, Persia, p. 14. According to Mounsey, they were sometimes willing ‘to gratify the curiosity of a European by lifting their veils’, and further, on visits to the Shrine of Shah ‘Abd al-’Azim to the south of Tehran, the road thither became a promenade, with the women keeping their attendants at a distance and uncovering ‘charms’ elsewhere kept hidden. Mounsey, Journey, p. 159. ‘Aim al-Saltana, making the same journey, does not report being the recipient of such favours, but he noted on a rail journey to Shah ‘Abd al-’Azim that the carriage was very crowded and that women out-numbered men two to one. Ruznama-yi khatirat-i ‘Ain al-Saltana, ed. I. Afshar and M. Salur, Tehran, 1373, I, p. 351. Mounsey, Journey, p. 160. R.B. Binning, A Journal of Two Years’Travel in Persia, Ceylon etc., London 1857; see also K. Mo’tazed and N. Kasra, Siyasat va haramsara - zan dar ‘asr-i Qajar, Tehran 1379, p. 220 for marriage amongst the elite. See S. Mahdavi, ‘Women, Shi’ism and Cuisine in Iran’ in Women, Religion and Culture in Iran, ed. S. Ansari and V. Martin, London, 2001, pp. 10–26. Ettehadieh, Tehran, p. 260. I. Schneider, ‘Muhammad Baqir Shafti (1180–1260/1766–1844) und die Isfahaner Gerichtsbarkeit’, Der Islam, 79, 2002, pp. 240–273 for discussion of an example. I am grateful for Dr Schneider for providing me with an abstract of this article in English. J. Malcolm, Persia, II, p. 393. Wills, Land, p. 276. Robertson to Sheil, 20 August 1842, FO 248/101. No. 35, 17 March 1859, FO 248/179. Enclosure in No. 76, 7 July 1861, FO 60/257. For another example of the punishment of a prostitute see K. Bayani, Panjeh sal-i tarikh-i Nasiri, V, Tehran, 1375, p. 367. The ‘ulama were, however, periodically vigilant about prostitution in any case. In Shiraz in 1894 Sayyid ‘Ali Akbar at the head of about 200 students and roughs entered a brothel by force in order to have the inmates arrested, but without success as the women had been tipped off with the connivance of the police. No. 792, 16 October 1994, FO 248/602. In 1892 Sayyid Abu Talib of Isfahan stopped a woman in the street and asked why she was wearing galoshes, calling her all sorts of names. She answered that she was not what he imagined and called for assistance. A number of people appeared and he had to take flight. No. 3007, 3 October 1992, FO 248/553. R.G. Watson, A History of Persia, London 1866, p. 19. Mounsey, Journey, p. 160; Wills, Persia, p. 67, M.H. Rajabi, Mashashir-i zanan-i Irani va Parsigu, Tehran, 1374, p. 36. Rajabi mentions Rababa Mara‘shi, the wife of Sayyid ‘Ali Shams al-Ma‘ali, Nasir al-Din Shah’s doctor, who started classes for girls in her house in 1852–1853 (1270) and taught for thirteen years, despite some popular pressure to close, Zanan, p. 104. Afary points out that from the 1870s Muslim girls attended the American Presbyterian School in Tehran, but it did not attract girls from the community at large because of the religious implications, Revolution, p. 182. The question of the effect that such educated women would have had on the general community of women is a subject lacking evidence, and yet much in need of further research. Enclosure in 4 January 1845, FO 248/113. No. 17, 31 January 1866, FO 60/296. No. 37, 23 March 1877, FO 248/329. The title of mulla, meaning learned, was accorded occasionally not only to women, but to members of the religious minorities, for example, to a Jew.

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35 Enclosure in No. 131, 23 May 1853, FO 248/150. 36 E.B. Eastwick, Journal of a Diplomat’s Three Years’ Residence in Persia, London, 1864, p. 231. He also lived near the bathhouse and reports that, ‘Swarms of muffled figures pass to a nearby bathhouse and ever and anon an unveiled face looks over into the Faringi’s garden, and a girlish titter, or, maybe a word or two of not the most complimentary nature, is addressed to the walker in the garden’, p. 232. 37 No. 575, 6 September 1993, Shiraz Agent FO 248/577. 38 No. 46, 23 February 1981, FO 60/522. 39 E. Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, London 1807, p. 80. 40 A. Mustaufi, Sharh-i zindigani-yi man ya tarikh-i ijtima‘i-yi Iran, Tehran 1324, I, pp. 210–2 gives an indication of the lives of female servants. Ettehadieh found the female servants’ wages to be 1 toman in cash per month and four sets of clothing each year, see Tehran, p. 262. 41 Watson, History, p. 27. 42 Ettehadieh, Tehran, p. 262. 43 Mu‘tazed and Kasra, Zan, pp. 226–7. 44 Ettehadieh, Tehran, p. 263. 45 Mu‘tazed and Kasra, Zan, pp. 218–19. 46 According to Picot, up to the time of Aqa Muhammad Qajar, in the late eighteenth century, women of all ranks were permitted to follow the army, but in the nineteenth century only women of the elite could do so. H. Picot, ‘Report on the Persian army’, FO 881/7364, p. 25. Of course, the women of lower ranks would have been largely tribal. 47 M. Tancoigne, A Narrative of a Journey into Persia and Residence in Tehran, London, 1820, p. 207. 48 Scott Waring, Sheeraz, p. 61. There are no more particulars as to the circumstances, and we most note that there would have been variations as between individual families. 49 Mounsey, Journey, p. 158. 50 Binning, Persia, p. 393. 51 Ibid., p. 393. 52 J. Gurney, ‘A Qajar Household and Its Estates’, Iranian Studies, XVI, 1983, Nos. 3–4, pp. 137–76. 53 No. 46, 27 June 1861, FO 248/199. 54 Hennell to Sheil, No. 436, 9 September 1844, FO 248/113. 55 No. 46, 15 November 1908, FO 248/935. 56 Schneider, Religion and State Jurisdiction during Naser al-Din Shah’s Reign’, in R.M. Gleane, ed., Religion and Society in Qajar Iran, London 2005, p. 7. 57 No. 18, 20 December 1849, FO 60/146. 58 MAE, Ambassade/Teheran/55, No. 5, 5 March 1861. 59 Encl. in No. 83, 11 August 1865, FO 60/290. 60 No. 108, 16 August 1871, FO 60/335. 61 From 26 Zhi al-Hujja 1295/21 12.1878, Sirjani, Vaqayi‘, p. 103. 62 W. Sparroy, Persian Children of the Royal Family, London 1902, p. 238. 63 21st Shavval 1302/3 August 1885, Sirjani, Vaqayi‘, p. 243. 64 No. 555, 24 July 1993, FO 248/547. Inflation caused by fluctuations in the exchange rate between silver and copper, the debasement of the coinage and a fall in the world price of silver affected the price of bread in the 1890s, causing much popular discontent. In September 1894 notices, placarded around Shiraz, threatened the Governor with a further riot over the economic situation. No. 778, 20 September 1994, FO 248/602. 65 Decypher No. 16, 26 October 1893, FO 248/572. 66 Zill al-Sultan to Nasir al-Din Shah, No. 3403 and No. 3404, 26 April 1894, FO 248/599.

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67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

No. 808, 16 November 1894, FO 248/602. Encl. in No. 25, 19 March 1895, FO 60/565. R. Tapper, Frontier Nomads of Iran, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 248–9. MFA 16 Shaval 1314/ 20 March 1897, 1314 B29 F9 No. 102. No. 42, 24 August 1840, FO 60/74. Hennell to Sheil, No. 15, 20 April 1840, 11 May 1840, and 19 June 1840 FO 248/99. Hennell to Sheil, 25 May 1840, FO 248/99. Hennell to Sheil, 18 June 1840, and 19 June 1840, FO 248/99. If the role of women here seems unusually assertive as compared to men, it should be remembered that they were staying the Shah’s wrath in an attempt to avoid bloodshed. From that point of view it would fit with the ta‘ziyya role for women in attempting to prevent the loss of life. No. 42, 24 August 1840, FO 60/74. No. 513, 19 May 1893, Shiraz Agent, FO 248/576. No. 513, 19 May 1893, Shiraz Agent, FO 248/576. No. 71, 13 May 1993, FO 248/578. Sykes to Lascelles, 31 May 1993, FO 248/578. E. Shahidi and A. Bulookbashi, Pajhuhishi dar ta‘ziyya va ta‘ziyya khani az aghaz ta payan-i daura-yi Qajar dar Tehran, Tehran, 1379, p. 45. S. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya dar Iran, Shiraz, 1380, p. 70. S.R. Peterson, ‘The Ta’ziyeh and Related Arts’ in P.J. Chelkowski (ed.), Ta’ziyeh, Ritual and Drama in Iran, New York, 1979, pp. 65–7; Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, p. 71. J. Calmard, ‘Le patronage des ta’ziyeh: elements pour une etude globale’, in Ta’ziyeh, ed. Chelkowsi, p. 123. See also J. Calmard, ‘Shi’i Rituals and Power II. The Consolidation of Safavid Shi’ism: Folklore and Popular Religion’ in C. Melville (ed.), Safavid Persia, London and New York, 1996, especially pp. 156–60. P. Chelkowski, ‘Ta‘ziyya’, Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition, Leiden, 2000, X, pp. 406–8. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, p. 106. Chelkowski, ‘Ta‘ziyya’, p. 406. Peterson, ‘Ta’ziyeh’ , p. 65. There are suggestions of Russian influence in the development of ta‘ziyya as theatre. Peterson notes that the earliest examples of theatres specifically developed for ta‘ziyyas date from the first two decades of the nineteenth century in the Russian provinces (ibid., p. 67). M. Mahjub considers that the change from processions to plays derived from Europe. He points out the early influence in north Iran, and sees a possible derivation in the Transcaucasus and other Muslim provinces of Russia. See ‘The Effect of European Theatre and the Influence of Its Theatrical Methods upon Ta’ziyeh’ in Ta’ziyeh, Chelkowski, ed. pp. 138–43. It is worth noting that European theatre had an influence on India at this time, financed by the Rajahs, R.K. Yajnik, The Indian Theatre, London 1933, pp. 84 ff. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 76–7. Ibid., p. 77. Chelkowski, ‘Ta‘ziyya’, p. 407. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 78–80. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 79–80. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 923. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, p. 106. Ibid., p. 160. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 61–2. W. Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East More Particularly Persia, London, 1823, III, pp. 165, 167.

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100 101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Calmard, ‘Ta’ziyeh’, p. 124. Rajab 1259/July-August 1843 SAM No. 240023275 location 1AB2Ch716. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, p. 168. Calmard, ‘Patronage’, p. 124. There is some indication that court ta‘ziyyas had an element of entertainment apart from the religious content of the play. In 1855 Murray reported to Clarendon that he had attended ‘a dramatic representation partly historical resembling the mysteries’. The play had ‘certain ridiculous adjuncts including the appearance on the stage of a Frank ambassador (a standard character in ta‘ziyyas) dressed up in an old cocked hat borrowed or bought from some of the foreign missions, and such other European clothes as can be found in Tehran. This ambassador, who is supposed to be interceding with Yezid for the family of Husain is armed with a telescope with which he scans the spectators and the surrounding scene, and he is accompanied by his wife and a vast train bearing presents to the Musulman chief.’ He goes on that the Iranian Government had thought to try and exclude the foreign missions from what the Sadr-i ‘Azam has the effrontery to term ‘the highest occasion of public worship in the Shi’ite creed, although he well knows that the dresses, the scenery, the music, the disguising of boys as women, the smoking, drinking sherbets in the building before and after the acts, together with other accessories are all so repugnant to the dogma and religious practices of Islam that none of the chief mullahs or ulemas will countenance the representations by their presence.’ Murray to Clarendon, No. 52, 17 September 1855, FO 60/203. Murray’s observations on the foreign emissary in the play may be compared to those of Kuzov attending a ta‘ziyya in Tabriz in the time of ‘Abbas Mirza. He wrote that the foreign ambassador appeared in a representation that was exceptionally laughable, particularly with regard to dress, and was riding a black horse, although Iranians as a whole did not like black horses. Cited in Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 77–8. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 82–3; Peterson, ‘Ta’ziyeh’ , p. 69. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya , p. 113. Chelkowski, ‘Ta‘ziyya’, p. 407; www. Oracle/Transfer/Serjik/ahmadi/salehi135.doc, p. 4. I am grateful to Mr Mehran Afshari for this reference; A. Amin, ‘Iran dar sal-i 1311 hijri qamari’, trans. M. Gharavi, Majala-yi barisi-ha-yi tarikhi, year 9, No. 4, 1353, pp. 90–1. ‘Itimad al-Saltaneh, Ruznameh, p. 517. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 109–10. Ibid., p. 110. Ouseley, Travels, III, pp. 165–6. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 78–9. Humayuni, Ta‘ziyya, p. 106. Shahidi and Bulookbashi, Ta‘ziyya, pp. 186, 289.

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Part II POOR PEOPLE’S POLITICS

3 POPULAR PROTEST, THE MARKET AND THE STATE IN NINETEENTH- AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EGYPT John Chalcraft

Introduction Orientalism, modernization theory and elite nationalist historiography have not shed a great deal of light on popular struggles for social, economic and political rights by subaltern groups in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. Such historiography remains vulnerable to the original charge made by subaltern studies in the late 1970s: it has largely ignored or distorted what Ranajit Guha called ‘the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite’.1 The dominant attitude in this domain is precisely that of Eric Hobsbawm in his acclaimed work, Age of Extremes: ‘the history of the makers of the Third World transformations . . . is the history of elite minorities.’2 Thus the reforming projects of Jacob Landau’s benevolent Egyptian state, for example, were hindered by the ‘appalling apathy of the people’.3 In this literature, urban workers have been largely ignored, and the peasantry are often seen as passive and tradition-bound, rebelling certainly, but not, in Vatikiotis’ words, for ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’.4 Marxist historiography pioneered the study of workers’ struggle in the context of growing capitalism, and a considerable body of work emerged tracing the growth of a working-class in Egypt, as elsewhere in the Middle East.5 But this work has been rightly faulted for having a narrow, Eurocentric conception of genuine struggle, and a deterministic, teleological and materialist framework for understanding it.6 Yet, historians persuaded by these criticisms and influenced by post-structuralism have often turned more to discourse analysis and cultural politics than to a more broad-based and nuanced study of popular protest.7 Those exploring ‘weapons of the weak’ have said very little about struggles for rights, and arguably only traverse an inevitable mismatch between official prescription and everyday avoidance, the latter being just as adeptly deployed by elite groups as by the weak.8 69

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Drawing on primary sources and published work, this chapter aims to illustrate the possibility of an alternative story about popular contention in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. Workers were not a backward or an oriental mass passively waiting for salvation from a modernizing elite, congenitally incapable of autonomous action, representation or speech. Nor were they a ‘clothcap proletariat’ in the making, or a unified, revolutionary subject.9 Instead, numerous workers inhabiting diverse subject positions facing various forms of social exploitation intensified by commodification and complex economic restructuring engaged in movements for ‘self-protection’, attempting to engage the state in a search for social and political rights. Such movements nested within the so-called traditional sector as well as in the ‘modern’ sector, and were to be found in town and country alike, being heavily related, as I will argue, to complex new forms of commodification and social exploitation. To draw up this illustration, I will examine forms of contestation and elite responses to them from diverse settings: the coal-heavers of Port Said, the porters of Alexandria, the weighers and measurers of Cairo, and the small cultivators of Lower Egypt. I will then pursue the related question of how subaltern groups attempted to secure electoral rights, and the fate of those electoral rights under the British.

Coal-heavers Strikes for higher wages by coal-heavers in Port Said have been seen by most as resulting from a distinctively new form of Marxian capitalist exploitation, where workers stripped of their means of subsistence sell only their labour power for wages to capitalists. I showed in a previous article that coal-heavers’ grievances were also inspired in part by the political opportunities attendant on state-building. I want to revisit the coal-heavers here to explore three points. First, to further emphasize that the forms of social exploitation faced by coal-heavers were more complex than the Marxian narrative allows. Second to emphasize that the coalheavers’ contestation aimed to draw in the state to arbitrate – to grant higher wages and better regulations. And third, to show how the colonial state failed to respond to coal-heavers’ attempts to secure improved regulation of their work and social rights. Coal-heavers in Port Said were migrants who probably owned some means of subsistence at home in Upper Egypt, or were hoping to secure the wherewithal to purchase such means through gaining higher rewards for their labour-power through intense labour in the dockyards of Port Sa‘id, after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.10 Migrants found temporary accommodation in wooden shacks built by their own hands with ‘borrowed’ materials in the ‘Arab village’ on the western outskirts of the ‘European’ town.11 Clothing, shelter and food were at a subsistence minimum.12 Like other migrants to the new town, such as bakers, bird-hunters, boatmen, carpenters, construction workers, fishermen, garbage-collectors, tailors, tinsmiths, shoemakers and so on, the coal-heavers were organized into guilds (ta’ifa/ tawa’if ).13 In practice, it is likely that in a new town, 70

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in a multiplying profession, where guild members were temporary and mostly recent arrivals from rural upper Egypt, there was little attachment to or knowledge of trade customs, sense of corporate identity or strongly felt guild solidarity.14 Guilds authorized and regulated work, and acted as units of tax and administration for the government. Where shipping companies squeezed down coaling wages as much as possible, where work was intensive, and where guild heads and contractors were largely unregulated – whether by the state or guild custom and ties of neighbourhood, kin and so on – and where labour supplies were abundant, exploitation, friction and struggle ensued. In a sense, the dockyards of Port Said, as elsewhere, were a microcosm of the operation of disembedded market relations acting to commodify labour.15 As the coal-heavers themselves put it in a report to the government during the First World War, ‘the misfortunes which have for a long time afflicted our guild have been considerable, and have made it easy for its shaykhs to give free reign to their ambition which has carried them to divide the salary of the workers.’16 The cash nexus became a key principle of social (dys)function in Port Said. As early as 1871, workers raised petitions complaining that the heads of teams, into which the coalers had been subdivided, were bringing in outsiders and leaving guild members without work. In 1873, complaints by workers and team-heads against the shaykh of the guild were offered to the Governor of Port Said. The shaykh was allegedly paying less than he should per unit weight of coal shifted, leaving some members without work, advancing usurious loans and docking pay without reason. The Governor transferred the complaints to the Council (majlis) in Damietta, which found the shaykh innocent and allowed him to continue in his post with a pledge (ta‘ahhud ) of good practice – a long-standing Ottoman device, but inadequate in the new context, as complaints rumbled on during the 1870s.17 The cash nexus and the commodification of labour was positively constituted by culture and power – it was not merely the result of narrowly economic, purely negative de-regulation. Human labour bought and sold, used and unused, shoved around, deployed and dismissed as a commodity was easier thought worthy of such a lowly status. Certainly, the manager of the Port Said and Suez Coal Company tried to justify to the English Consul the wages paid in the following manner: It is hardly necessary to point out to you that there is a vast difference between the requirements of an Arab as compared with those of an English labourer. Thanks to a genial Climate and a low order of civilization, the wants of an Arab are comparatively almost Nil. He has no School Boards to pay, hardly the necessity of clothing himself at all, his firing he steals from us, no wear and tear of shoe-leather or any of the expenses entailed by decency and civilization . . . [Hence] the Arab paid at the rate of 1 Franc a ton is well off. [And] . . . the Employers instead of being the oppressors as the Arab Commission would have it are really the oppressed.18 71

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In short, the company manager declared, coal-heavers, who were without the needs and wants of the civilized and the decent, could rightly do with ‘almost Nil’, anything more constituted oppression for the coal companies. Of course, the ability to put forward such ideas with a straight face had much to do, not just with entrenched notions of racial and civilizational hierarchy, but with power relations. It was easy, for example, for the Governor of Port Said to intervene in response to complaints by the porters of goods that the coal-heavers were muscling in on their turf by carrying lime, stone, sand and seeds, and to solve the problem, by prohibiting the coal-heavers from this profession.19 It was not so easy to contravene the firmly stated wishes of the coaling companies, particularly as they threatened to bring in labour from Malta rather than raise wages, something to which the British were opposed because it would have meant a loss of tax revenue. Hence, although there was a regulatory void in Port Said, which allowed the cash nexus to rage, there was also a positively constituted discursive and political universe, which confirmed high rates of what should therefore be seen as social exploitation. The commodification of labour was not just a matter of de-regulation, but a cultural and political project. Various commissions were sent out to Port Said to investigate the situation, and detailed regulations were drawn up as a result for the first time in 1893, but the regulations had no teeth, Governorate officials were bribed off, and abuses and strikes continued for decades. A detailed petition from numerous coal heavers was sent in 1896 to Lord Cromer. Over eight pages credibly detailed abuses over pay, conditions, dismissal, usury and monopolistic trading by the contractors in the dock. A correspondence ensued between Cromer and Mr Royle of the Port Said and Suez Coal Company. The latter, along with the heads of the other coaling companies, insisted that the petition must have been ‘induced by fraud and misrepresentation’, because ‘we are certain that our men are contented and have no grievances.’ ‘The movement is caused’ Royle went on, ‘by certain notorious Arabs – dismissed Sheikhs of coal labourers who are intriguing to get back into Power’. Royle and the others went so far as to seek to obtain the petition in order to demonstrate its falsity and so that the ‘fabricators may be brought to light and punishment.’20 Cromer did not send them the petition, but otherwise his response to the grievances which he himself had considered ‘real’ in a previous letter,21 was a disaster for the social rights of coal-heavers. He responded: I understand from your letter that the principal employers of labour are satisfied with the existing condition of affairs, and do not consider that anything need be done in the way of removal of alleged grievances. I daresay you are quite right. In any case, I am not in a position to gainsay your opinion . . . Under the circumstances, I scarcely think it necessary to send the petition to Port Sa‘id. So far as I am concerned, the matter may be dropped.22

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Thus the colonial state remained distant from the docks, the companies and the contractors were left to rule, and the coal-heavers remained in conditions of grinding exploitation. In spite of ongoing strike action and violence against strikers and scab labour, further petitions, and detailed representations from the coal-heavers as to what regulations should be drawn up and enforced, nothing was done for decades, and coal-heavers’ social rights remained unprotected, and the exploitative labour regime continued.

Porters A brief examination of the case of the porters at weigh-stations in the docks of Alexandria can also grant some insight into new and complex forms of exploitation associated with the growth of market relations, which were broadly continuous between the so-called ‘traditional’ sector and the so-called modern sector, the struggle for social rights joined by those adversely affected, and the reasons for and more conservative forms of subsequent state intervention.23 The Ottoman guilds were supposed to safeguard the livelihoods of their members by preventing too many from practicing the trade, which would lead to glut, falling prices, cut-throat competition and loss of livelihoods.24 Regulation of trade entry was therefore an important principle of guild-functioning, as was the right of members to have their work protected. Rapid social and economic change during the nineteenth century, and the restructuring of the crafts and service economy put significant pressure on livelihoods: many were lost, some were re-organized, others were re-built in new social forms, some migrated, others muscled in on new territory and others were burdened with the competition of unregulated labour. The porters at the weigh-stations in Alexandria port appear to have suffered on this last point, as the weighers in the port, cutting costs, started employing cheap and unregulated labour from outside the porters’ guild, leaving porters out of work. It was said that ‘some are not able to subsist because the weighers are bringing whoever they need from outside, and not bringing individuals from this guild.’25 Rather than submit to ‘market forces’, the porters took a radical step: they petitioned the authorities to carry out a communal division of wealth (al-rukiyya) within their own guild to compensate those who had lost out. As the police explained to the Governorate, ‘the communal division of income (al-tarwik) required the division of all [guild] income among the rank and file of the workers (‘ala ‘umum al-anfar’).26 The porters were inspired not by European socialism, but by an old egalitarian custom that occasionally crops up in the Ottoman sources, and still existed in some guilds, even in the 1870s.27 As the police reported, ‘in some of the guilds the workers equalize with each other (yatasawi al-anfar ma‘ ba‘daha) outside of government intervention (barraniyan) and it is known officially by the police that the guild of brokers and agents agreed on this communal division of income.’28 It would appear that the porters’ guild was

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incapable of enforcing this old custom on their own, possibly owing to the pressures of economic restructuring, and hence the appeal to state intervention. Unfortunately for the porters’ social rights, the police stressed the importance of individual effort and productive work against notions of communal obligation and welfare, and decided against official recognition and implementation of redistribution. Instead they resorted to the more familiar and conservative practice of extracting a pledge from the weighers that they continue to employ only guildorganized porters in their trade. The right of guild members (rather than outsiders) to work was re-affirmed, but a more radical possibility, that of social redistribution, was excluded. The case of the porters illustrates the processes in which I am interested in this chapter, involving new forms of social exploitation, movements for self-protection claiming social or political rights, a state thereby drawn into trade affairs, but ultimately failing to provide, or only partially providing for the social and or political rights claimed by subaltern groups.

Weighers and measurers The 1897 census recorded almost ten thousand measurers in Egypt, with over one thousand in Cairo, the majority at the grain ports in Bulaq and Old Cairo.29 Measurers were principally involved in measuring cloth in markets and depots, and grains (maize, wheat, barley, rice, cotton seeds, full beans, lentils and sesame) in major ports and minor landing stations up and down the country.30 Weighers were also an important presence in a variety of trades, weighing coal, coffee, precious metals, soap, spices, meat and vegetables in ports, weigh-stations, warehouses and town and country markets the length of Egypt. The 1897 census lists almost two thousand weighers in Egypt, 275 of whom worked in numerous locations in Cairo.31 The interest of these trades for my purposes here is that they occupied a key location in the interstices of Egypt’s growing market. Weighers and measurers had long ‘facilitate[d] commercial transactions by bringing to them guarantees of impartiality and good faith’.32 Commodification, ‘traffic’, exchange, monetization all had a direct impact on trades usually problematically considered to be located somewhere in a stagnant, traditional sector. Here I want to give a brief illustration of how changing economic relations gave rise to friction and exploitation, new chances for those with wealth or status to exploit their position, processes which in turn activated movements for self-protection by weighers, measurers and traders, movements which then operated to push forward standardization as well as to drag the bureaucratic, centralizing state into trade affairs. Consider the following case of fraud among the Bulaq measurers in 1852, a case sufficiently important to be summarized in a catalogue of major regulations in weighing and measuring from 1830 to 1875 as follows: A judgement from the High Court (majlis al-ahkam) on 8 Safar 1269 [21 November 1852] verified by the Ketkhuda’s office on 9 Safar 1269, 74

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[contained] a letter to the police comprising the complaints of two persons about the just practice (haqq) of Muhammad Abu Shanab, a foreman in Bulaq port. These two [persons] are Hasan ‘Abd and Hasan ‘Usfur. It was judged by the court that the defendant be totally prevented from taking and giving and measuring in cereals and similar [goods]. And the aforementioned Muhammad Abu Shanab is to be prevented and completely removed from the post of foreman. The police are to try to find out about the measurers in grain-selling shops and about whoever is found using measures more than those fixed and take the necessary action with him by means of the police. The surveillance is [carried out] by means of those responsible for regulating prices and weights in the streets.33 It appears that Abu Shanab, a foremen of the measurers in Bulaq port, had been found guilty by the High Court of using, or of tolerating the use by those under his supervision of adulterated measures. Only the measures fixed by the government, as usual since the time of Mehmet Ali, were to be allowed. The profession of those who brought the complaint against adulteration – Hasan ‘Abd and Hasan ‘Usfur – is not disclosed, but they may well have been grain merchants who either sold or bought through the defendant, and had thus lost out by his fraudulent practice. Perhaps the extension of the market was provoking conflicts between those linked to the measuring trade. The matter was serious enough to get to the High Court probably because it took place in Cairo’s main grain port and involved a foreman, responsible for a dozen or more measurers. Abu Shanab not only lost his post as foreman, but was also ejected from the trade altogether by court order. State regulations were to be implemented not by guild officials, who are not mentioned, and may have been seen as part of the problem, but by the more centrally controlled police. The ruling, further, ordered the police to proactively implement surveillance on measurers in the grain shops. We do not know if Abu Shanab made some unofficial, later return to the trade, and/or if malpractice continued, perhaps through the corruption of the police. The evidence here does indicate that those involved in struggles over measuring, under conditions of trade expansion and reorganization, made appeals to the centralizing state, its secular courts and its codes and principles to secure their rights, and thus, whether intentionally or not, brought bureaucratic practice more intensively to bear on trade practice.34 The same pattern can be seen vividly in the case of complaints about measuring foremen in Giza and the subsequent launching of a major regulatory project. In 1867, after a decision by the Privy Council, a country-wide project was launched to subject measures to a sound regulation. According to the powerful all-Egypt Inspector, in his instructions to Upper and Lower Egypt which set up the project, the initiative was launched as a result of the discovery of corruption among the measurers of Giza, which was found out in turn because of the complaints of a number of lowly measurers themselves about their exploitative foremen. 75

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As he wrote, ‘the mudir of Giza had discovered what was going on because of complaints from the measurers about their foremen.’35 We learn from the mudir of Giza himself, in a later letter to the Upper Egypt Inspectorate, that the problem was that the Giza measurers were not under ‘sound regulations’ (rawabit mustaqima), the problem being that: [the measurers] were not under the supervision of anyone, and therefore complaints and grievances were lodged by the measures in Giza about the presence of a shaykh and a group of foremen, who take a share of the measuring fees. So the current fee that they take is not fixed but independently determined, and so the situation is not free of treachery against the cereals owners or the merchants in collecting the fee, and the measures are not accurate because they are not from the government. It would appear that shaykhs and foremen were ripping off both measurers as well as the merchants who had to pay inflated fees to have their grains measured. The mudir continued: And for the sake of removing these troubles and [for the sake of] lack of treachery to anyone . . . we approved that measures used by the measurers be made by the government, [that they be] metal-covered and stamped and that they are from the government. And that the measurers in the town have just one foreman according to the consent of the guild and are thereby under the supervision of the government for no thieving of their fee by a group of foremen or treachery to the buyers and sellers. And the rate is assessed at 1 piastre per ardab collected from the seller, half to the measurers and the foreman and half to the government in return for government action on behalf of order and regulation (al-dabt wa-l-rabt) and distributing the measures on its account.36 The regulatory project which followed involved the entire country and generated hundreds of documents. Measurers seeking social rights and self-protection in the face of the treachery of their foremen attendant on growing market relations and the reorganization of the measuring trade, drew the eyes and ears of the central state closer to the everyday life of the trade. They also worked to drive forward the standardization of such measures, a process central to the logic of both the bureaucracy and, even more surprisingly, perhaps, the ramification of the market.

Cultivators Although ‘the peasantry’ is often studied in isolation, and hence sometimes appears to have existed in a completely separate world, arguably similar market processes, popular movements for self-protection against new forms of social exploitation and inadequate state responses were at work in respect of subaltern groups in the countryside. Peasants are often seen as timeless, backward, passive, 76

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personalistic, obsequious, congenitally turbulent, fickle, incapable of recognizing benevolent government or unable to represent themselves. On the other hand, ‘the peasantry’ has been seen as an authentic, revolutionary class struggling for national independence and socialism. My reading of petitions and protests emanating from the countryside and responses to them suggests that peasants struggled to apply their own developing moral economy in the face of new forms of social exploitation, often associated with the spread of market relations, and to do so they occasionally made appeals to the state and its regulations and codes in petitions. These struggles for justice resulted in part in the encroachment of the central state on village affairs, but they just as often met with indifference by the powers-that-be, particularly because of the political economy of labourrepressive agriculture, but most of all after 1882 because of the repressive, conservative orientation of the colonial state. A glimpse of this is caught in the following brief example. In what must have been a fairly typical case at a time of the large estate formation, usury, eviction and landlessness associated with commercialization, thirty-four now landless cultivators, from the village of Kafr Akhsha, near the town of Tala, Minufiyya province, protested in three petitions during the summer of 1880 to the Interior Ministry against their village headman – ‘Abd al-Qadir Hashim – who they accused of dispossessing them from their small-holdings and forcing them to work in ‘captivity and slavery’ on the very land they used to own.37 To add dishonour to injury, the petitioners also spoke of ‘the capture of our women’.38 They asserted their own collective rights by arguing that ‘it will not be possible to destroy all of us for the satisfaction of one person.’39 Although the outcome of this case is unfortunately not known, these petitions allows a glimpse of lowly cultivators seeking state intervention following new forms of social exploitation associated with commercialization.

Elections pursued As historians have now recognized, elections for village shaykhs in the countryside and for guild heads and deputies in the towns were introduced in the late 1860s. These new forms of limited local democracy, which were rather glossed over by earlier historians, formed the electoral basis for the Consultative Assembly of Representatives, established in 1866, and were part of the khedive Isma‘il’s attempts to boost tax revenues by rooting out corruption.40 I want to visit this question here first in order to emphasize the intensity and widespread nature of popular participation in these new forms of limited grassroots democracy. Second, I intend to put these elections in their economic context – that is, to show how subaltern electoral participation was part of the more general movement for self-protection against the social exploitation arising from the commodification of relations of production and exchange. This is particularly evident when one draws attention to a hitherto rather unnoticed fact: that these were not local elections for state officials, narrowly defined, but for village shaykhs and guild 77

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heads and deputies, who although discharging state-like functions, were also very much practicing members of trades, and who made their living through cultivation or trade, as well as through other economic activities – such as contracting – attendant on their position. In other words, the elections represented at least the hesitant beginnings of something more radical than one might first assume, that is, they represented a kind of partial democratization of the local structures of economic life. The third point is to underline how popular actions drew in the central state and its bureaucratic forms. Finally, I aim to show how labour-repressive agriculture and the colonial state rolled back these popular forms and then blocked their reintroduction. Elections for the shaykhs and deputies of guilds, involving ballot counting by the police, were widespread and keenly contested. Not only did numerous elections among a great variety of crafts, services and retail trades take place in Cairo and Alexandria,41 but also in towns across Upper and Lower Egypt. To pick just the example of Port Said, the fishermen and fish-salters elected a shaykh in 1869, the tailors likewise, the coal-heavers elected a shaykh in 1870 and even the heads of their work teams as the 1870s wore on, the brokers chose a shaykh in 1871, as did the traders in green vegetables; the construction workers held elections in 1875, the metalworkers in 1875, the upholsterers in the same year and in 1876 the dyers chose their guild head. This example, the pattern of which was repeated in weaker or stronger forms in Egypt’s towns, as guilds subdivided, or as old heads passed away or became incompetent or criminal, or as new guilds were created, points to the fact that during the 1870s guild-head selection by election became a standard feature of the urban landscape.42 As research by Cole and myself has shown these elections were fiercely contested affairs, complete with ballot-rigging and bribery, and surrounded by petitions. My point is not to suggest that the urban trades had entered a golden age of shop democracy. The process had multiple flaws. The idea instead is to argue that the evidence indicates that popular elements seized on electoral rights and tried to use them to exercise some measure of control over their local leaders. Whether they were genuinely successful or not is another matter, although there are some cases, such as that of the carters of Bulaq, where electoral principles appear to have won out against unpopularity and vested interests.43 Where did enthusiasm for elections come from? First, the principle of selection by guild members of their leaders was not radically new. Against older views, wedded to clichés about ‘Oriental despotism’, scholars have shown over and over again that appointments of guild leaders across the Ottoman empire tended to be merely a ratification of the wishes of senior members of the guild. In Egypt, for example, Ghazaleh has detailed a number of cases wherein senior members gathered in front of the qadi to select their leader. The difference after 1869 was that first the police (a now more centralized arm of the state), not the semiautonomous qadi, ratified the appointment, and second, ballots were counted more formally than before, and were cast, apparently, by a larger proportion of guild members. In other words, members of the crafts and trades were not entering 78

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some alien universe when they engaged in a selection process for their leadership; 1869 represented instead mere modification to long-standing Ottoman practice – although selection before the qadi may have been interrupted during the middle decades of the century, when Mehmet Ali’s tax offices seem to have taken over responsibility for appointment ratification. If elections made some sense culturally to guild members, they also had urgent reasons to engage in them, as local leaders divided a heavier tax burden, and as commodification put into their hands new means of exploitation, associated with wages, contracts, conditions at work and so on, which the interpersonal, flexible codes of customary law and kinship ties do not seem to have been able to adequately regulate. The measurers of Bulaq port, for example, confronted the entrenched power of a shaykh, one Hasan Abdullah, who was involved in a contracting scam which short-changed the guild rank and file. The shaykh had been officially dismissed from his post because of a court finding against him, but escaped confinement by launching an appeal. Meanwhile, he reinstated himself, garnered police support somehow and installed various cronies as deputies, who proceeded to monopolize measuring contracts and rent out measurers in an exploitative way. Previously the measurers simply took the fee directly from the seller of grain, whereas now the deputies took the fee and distributed it later, taking their own unfair cut in the process. As some 134 measurers put it in a long petition submitted in December 1876: ‘it is not permitted to dispossess the guild of about three hundred persons of work and of all the orders of the government.’ In fact, Hasan Abdullah, it was asserted, ‘takes us as slaves, even though slavery and monopoly are forbidden, and yet his intention is to take us by a type of slavery just as when he was guild head’.44 Faced with this situation, the first recourse of the measurers, given that Hasan Abdullah was legally not entitled to hold the post of shaykh any longer because of his conviction, was to elect a new shaykh and three new deputies who enjoyed their support. They had to mobilize further petitions in order to make their choice stick, but the point here is that faced with new forms of exploitation, participation in guild elections represented a way for guild members to protect themselves and to maintain some control over those who held considerable economic power over their lives. In other words, elections did not just represent a top-down political principle superimposed as window-dressing on an otherwise ‘traditional’ and passive society, but embodied political rights which guild members seized on in order to soften exploitative economic structures. They may or may not have represented a full-blown shop democracy by the early 1880s, but that many guild members sought to use them for such a purpose seems undeniable. Moreover, in this particular case, the popular choices were respected. It should also be clear that guild members’ enthusiastic participation in elections up and down the country, elections which were now supervised by the police, worked to draw in, entrench and legitimate the bureaucratic functioning of the centralizing state. Urban struggles for electoral rights had a more embattled analogue in the countryside. Rural movements to ensure democratic selection of local leaders 79

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have mostly gone unnoticed in the scholarly literature, but such activism did exist, as new research is beginning to show.45 The petitions and reports of the fallahin of Nashil district in Gharbiyya Province, submitted during 1873; related government correspondence allow a glimpse of this.46 The small cultivators in question were complaining about various exploitative practices in cultivation and taxation associated with their shaykhs, Dawud al-‘Asi, Muhammad al-‘Asi and Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Jawwad. They started demanding an election (targhib) at some point in late 1872 or early 1873. At length, the Inspector of Kufr al-Shaykh mounted an investigation and the Provincial Offices finally agreed to hold an election (targhib al-ahali), which was duly conducted in the presence of all the necessary officials. A certain Badawi al-Dalu’ was elected as shaykh, and the offending shaykhs were removed from their posts. The petitioners announced that ‘the people felt justice and their condition was good.’ Interestingly, Badawi al-Dalu‘, following his accession, initiated a limited land redistribution, which worked in favour of his supporters. The election, which was partly inspired by cultivators seeking social rights in the face of economic exploitation, also had economic consequences. However, after much fierce politiking by the shaykhs who lost out in this election, and several more elections only reaffirming the original result, the peasants of Nashil were to lose their battle when the Inspector for Lower Egypt made the conservative ruling that as it was harvest time and peasant labour was required in the fields no more elections should be held and everything should return to the status quo ante.47 This was a defeat for the fallahin of Nashil and for fragile attempts to claim social and political rights in the face of ‘tyranny’, injustice and the political economy of labour repressive agriculture.

Elections abolished Electoral rights were therefore pursued after 1869 both in town and country by subaltern groups aiming to protect themselves against new pressures, often associated with the market, by acquiring some control over locally exploitative leaderships. As we have seen, labour-repressive agriculture hardly provided a propitious environment for such struggles, but the coming of the colonial state, conservatively oriented to holding a territory strategically astride the Suez Canal, stymied them altogether by abolishing these elections and the fragile political rights and social rights which they had implied. In spite of claims that the British sought to extend the principle of representative and democratic government to their ‘subject races’, in fact British rule abolished existing rights, and then, in alliance with the palace and major landowners, set itself against their reintroduction, against mounting political opposition. It was not so much that the British said one thing and did another. Ruling discourse was not a matter of simple mystification, but elaborated a more hegemonic case, to which the honest and supposedly well-intentioned could sign up. The British authorities in Egypt and commentators in England argued that in principle British rule stood for representative self-government, the development 80

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of ‘free institutions’ and honest, sound administration. They very rarely claimed, incidentally, that they stood for popular social and democratic rights, notions smacking of dangerous radicalism. The basic idea was that the ‘subject races’ in general, and ‘Orientals’ in particular, were incapable of exercising self-government ‘with advantage’ and therefore the only responsible and benign course of action was to train them to do so. The alternative in the nineteenth century, as far as educated opinion was concerned, was not to withdraw from Empire and hand over independence, but instead to regard the Oriental as a lost cause, and to rule over inferior peoples while ignoring the burden and responsibility of the imperial race. In fact both Lord Dufferin and Lord Cromer, respectively the architect and ruler of Egypt’s shallow constitutional regime after 1882, fell more into the latter camp of opinion than the former, believing the ‘Oriental’ to be incapable of learning honest self-government. Hence Cromer believed, and claimed that Dufferin did also, that the British only gestured towards constitutionalism in Egypt as a sop to public opinion in England. Dufferin suggested, in Cromer’s words, ‘in deference, to a great extent, to British public opinion a certain development of free institutions’, but did not believe that they would work, because of local defects. As he wrote ‘in the East, even the germs of constitutional freedom are non-existent . . . A long-enslaved nation instinctively craves for the strong hand of a master, rather than for a lax constitutional regime. A mild ruler is more likely to provoke contempt and insubordination than to inspire gratitude.’48 Order had to come before liberty. Only a dreamy theorist could reverse this ‘natural order’ of things and grant liberty ‘to the poor ignorant representatives of the Egyptian people’. Egypt had to be morally healed before being politically regenerated.49 With these attitudes at the centre, it is hardly surprising that the environment for meaningful elections became exceedingly harsh. Dufferin’s idea was that the last Assembly had been ‘excitable and childish’, was nothing but a ‘Fellahin [peasant] parliament’ and served as a field of intrigue for the Porte, France and Italy.50 He therefore suggested institutions for ‘criticism, discussion and suggestion’ rather than bodies that might ‘legislate or . . . control the executive’.51 His key idea, according to Cromer, was ‘to give the Egyptian people an opportunity of making their voices heard, but at the same time not to bind the executive Government by parliamentary fetters, which would have been out of place in a country whose political education was so little advanced as that of Egypt.’52 The Consultative Assembly of Representatives, which by 1882 had become the centre of a serious constitutional movement led by the ‘Urabiyyin,53 was therefore abolished and in May 1883 an Organic Law (al-qanun al-nizami) established a new system. The Khedive and the Council of Ministers was retained. The Assembly was effectively divided into two: a Consultative Assembly (majlis shura al-qawanin) of 30 members on the one side, with a purely consultative role, and a General Assembly (al-jama‘iyya al-‘umumiyya) of 46 members on the other.54 New provincial councils were created. The Election Law (qanun al-intikhab) of May 1883 provided an indirect electoral system: all adult males were to elect for every bandar or village (balad), elector-delegates, who in turn were to elect the 81

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non-appointed members of the Consultative Assembly, the General Assembly and the Provincial Councils.55 This truncated system of indirect elections and threadbare consultation was hailed by its English champions as ‘the highest form of constitutional experiment’.56 The new system spelt the demise of elections for village shaykhs. The new local elections involved casting ballots not for local leaders who had significant social power in the locality, but for elector-delegates, ‘the successors of the lately elected sheiks’,57 whose sole official purpose was to elect the members of distant and toothless institutions. Small wonder that peasants showed little interest in participating in such a meaningless exercise, inaction that was regarded as proof of racial docility by Britons such as Lord Milner.58 The new situation was formalized in a decree of March 1895, which stipulated that village shaykhs (as well as ‘umdas) were appointed by a commission headed by the mudir (or his deputy) and including a representative of the Interior Ministry, the local prosecutor and four notables or ‘umdas appointed to the commission by the mudir. The commission’s decision was based on a list of candidates drawn up by the Provincial Authorities and was approved by the Interior Ministry.59 In this tightly controlled system, village headmen were now to be chosen not by the people, but by the government. Such state control not only undermined the representative form of the office, but its legal independence too. For over the following decades and throughout the inter-war period successive governments now dismissed ‘umdas and shaykhs for political reasons.60 Furthermore, the government – in the shape of the Interior Ministry – now decided how many ‘umdas and shaykhs were to preside over the villages.61 This was an important derogation from the rights of the villagers, who prior to the British invasion had been able through popular mobilization to determine the number of local shaykhs. A further blow to the poor was the fact that the law of 1895 established a minimum property qualification for the posts of ‘umda and shaykh, to ensure that only the relatively well-off elements in the village could hold a measure of local political power. Hence the law ‘required every candidate for the office of ‘umda to be the owner of at least ten feddans and every shaykh to own at least five feddans’. In other cases, selection was to be from ‘those who paid the highest taxes’.62 In the early 1890s, moreover, with crime seen as one as Egypt’s key problems in rural areas, the British gave ‘umdas the power to settle minor civil and criminal cases (subject to appeal) in the early 1890s, a move ‘supported by the full weight of Indian practice’.63 The measure was supposedly to make justice more accessible to the mass of the population. In fact, it was aimed at consolidating the local status quo, tying justice very firmly to local forms of patronage, kin and property, and diminishing differentiation between social and political power. By 1906 British officials were arguing that ‘[t]he Omdeh has come to need protection. He is the servant of all and master of none.’64 By 1911, village guards under the ‘umda’s control were armed and given ‘military training’.65 The new rural order, in which the political and social rights of peasants were set back, and where state-controlled local leaders were strengthened vis-à-vis 82

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their underlings, suited Cromer’s vision of the countryside, where the mass of the fallahin were regarded as illogical, apathetic, ignorant, emotional, credulous, fickle and ‘easily led away by lying agitators and intriguers’.66 Village shaykhs, on the other hand, as pillars of this conservative order, were seen more positively. ‘Many of them’, wrote Cromer, ‘are sturdy, honest yeomen who are well deserving of respect. Others are inclined to cringe before the Pashas and to bully the fellaheen. I should add that these latter tendencies, which were especially marked in the pre-reforming days, are rapidly disappearing.’67 What was decisive, though, was a colonial politics which sought to retard the political development of the countryside – to secure ‘order’ and ‘tranquility’ through the power of local notables, the experience of India being uppermost. Berque may not have been exaggerating too much when he wrote that Cromer was ‘terrified by the vision of the communes awakening to political life’.68 Certainly the British proved incapable of pursuing even Lord Dufferin’s limited vision for the development of ‘local self-government’,69 or Lord Granville’s pious hopes for the ‘the prudent development of popular institutions’.70 On the contrary, the British, long after Cromer had left, set their face against all proposals to further local democracy by bringing back elections for village shaykhs, or introducing them for ‘umdas. Such proposals revived after 1907,71 and motions demanding that the ‘umda be elected by the villages were ‘frequently submitted to the General and Legislative Assemblies in the years 1912 to 1914’, and by the Wafd during the 1920s and 1930s.72 All such proposals – a ‘constant aim’ of elements in the Wafd73 – were rebuffed or derailed. Sa‘d Zaghlul himself, had championed ‘daring schemes’ to ensure the independence of the ‘umda and subject the office to elections. As Berque notes ‘[s]ignificantly, the King himself took alarm at them, for such projects were of a sort to shake up the power of the throne, and the British ambassador himself took up the cause of the mudir’s authority. Such an alliance is highly revealing.’74 It was not only the British who adopted a conservative position, of course. In addition to the monarchy, parliamentary deputies tied to the Palace or to landed power spoke on the ‘errors that may result from the election rather than the appointment of members’.75 By the 1940s there was still no ‘prospect of communal electoral organization’.76 Small wonder that during these years the negative reputation of ‘umdas was firmly fixed in Egyptian public consciousness: ‘[p]etty local potentates, accomplices of the tyranny of landlords and of electoral deception’.77 Under the British, small cultivators had lost any electoral means of exerting control over their local leadership, and thus the forms of ‘captivity’, ‘slavery’, usury, forced proletarianization and eviction that came with commodification and the cultural and political circumstances of the time. ‘Feudalism’, in the sense meant by the villagers studied by Reem Saad raged on,78 while the mass market remained weak, labour super-exploited, and productivity-raising mechanization a distant and unlikely prospect. To return to the city in closing, elections for guild leaders were also abolished when the ‘freedom of the trades’ was announced in 1890. The strength of the 83

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export economy, the resistance of guild members to taxation, the poverty of the small-scale craft, retail and service economy meant that the British abolished what were known as ‘vexatious’ taxes on the urban guilds in 1890. With this measure the official functions of guild shaykhs, who in the eyes of the state had become little more than decentralized and difficult to control tax-collectors, largely disappeared, and anyone was permitted to practice a trade following the acquisition of a licence from the relevant government office. No longer were crafts, retailers and service workers able to try to hold their leadership to account by electoral means, or seek to use the state to enforce the principle of consent in regard to the affairs of the trade. Property relations, forms of contracting, racketeering, informal arrangements and eventually, following strikes and demonstrations, new organizations such as syndicates and unions would start to become more and more important in trade life. Struggles against new and old forms of social exploitation had to find new ways to assert social and political rights. Traders from far away Aswan still hoped to elect their shaykh as late as 1911, only to discover that this institution had been abolished.79

Conclusion This chapter has drawn together a number of episodes of contention from settings usually thought of as radically diverse – town and country, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, ‘working class’ as well as ‘guild’. The idea is to show that among diverse subaltern groups, from the coal-heavers in the dockyards of Port Said, to peasants in Lower Egypt, to weighers and measurers in Cairo, a number of similar kinds of processes, associated with world economic integration and state-building, were at work. At the heart of these changes, I argue here, were forms of economic restructuring and the spread of market relations. These were always more complex than primitive accumulation followed by proletarianization, but they nonetheless created friction and social exploitation through the reorganization of relationships and re-allocation of resources, often between those owning some kind of capital or status, such as company managers, contractors, guild heads, or village shaykhs, and those subordinated to them, such as coal-heavers, weighers, porters, small cultivators and so on. The spread of market relations itself was not a narrowly economic or objective process, but involved distributions of power and culture: the cash nexus was brought to bear on coal-heavers, for example, not by nature or by the market alone, but by the relative power of the shipping companies and contractors, and by cultural attitudes by power-holders and contestants alike. The application of the cash nexus itself was a social product, involving culture and power, and exploitation was always social exploitation, in its origin, apprehension and contestation. It should therefore be no surprise that commodification could accompany significant degrees of violence, as in the countryside for example, where forced or unpaid labour accompanied by coercion was not uncommon, or where the shipping companies in Port Said brought in British troops to 84

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smash strike action. Egypt’s changing economy, and changing labour regimes within it, therefore, can hardly be adequately thought of in terms of ‘Oriental’ and ‘Western’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, pre-capitalist and capitalist. Nor was economic change dissolved into a play of poststructuralist signification. In Polanyi’s terms, these years witnessed an always embedded commodification, a work in progress, accompanying a shifting array of exploitative labour regimes. The second point illustrated above is that this unfinished work of alwaysembedded commodification and new forms of social exploitation gave rise, in town and country alike, to collective movements of self-protection by subaltern groups, in the form of petitions, protests, strikes, and attempts to seize electoral rights. Protestors objected to injustice, tyranny, treachery, captivity, slavery, loss of livelihoods, land seizure, monopoly and low wages, among other things. The struggle for justice involved the claim to a variety of social and political rights, ranging from the submission to ruling practice of norms – drawn from moral economy, guild custom, Ottoman codes or new regulations, to electoral rights, to the redistribution of wealth. I have emphasized in this regard that elections did have a presence in town and country during the 1870s, and that subaltern groups sought to make their electoral rights meaningful through participation in them, rights which had a bearing not just on politics and the state, narrowly defined, but on local structures of social exploitation. Subaltern groups were neither passive nor fatally hobbled by the ‘dye of traditional culture’. Indeed old norms relating to the right to work, the selection of leaders, or to the communal division of wealth informed subaltern activism, and worked to make sense of harsh new conditions. Protest was not somehow ‘Oriental’, but bore family resemblances to protest movements elsewhere in the colonized world, and indeed in Europe, where movements of self-protection against the market were engaged. Moreover, where protest was joined from a diverse set of subject positions, and various conditions of exploitation, there was no inevitable high road towards the emergence of a conscious, organized, working class fighting for socialism. The third conclusion that one can draw from the foregoing relates to relations between subaltern and elite groups. Modernizing elites did not have a monopoly on change or on progressive change. Indeed, in the examples I have related above, concentrations of power associated with the state, the economy and the empire, typically worked to oppose and repress subaltern social and political rights. Attempts to bring new social rights over wages or redistribution or rule-bound ruling practice pushed power-holders reluctantly into action, or were opposed and broken down. The right to hold elections, and to have the results stick had to be fought for from below. In Nashil, as we saw, the Inspector for Lower Egypt eventually cancelled the results of legitimately convened elections as he was worried about the harvest. The British abolished electoral rights and left exploitation to rage unchecked in the dockyards of Port Said. Social legislation, even into the inter-war period, was virtually non-existent, and largely toothless where it did appear. Overall, this chapter aims to provide a glimpse of an alternative story about popular contention in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. Against 85

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Orientalism and modernization theory, this story asserts that positive change could come from below, and that instead of being the sole authors of modernity and progress, elite groups could play a major role in stifling positive change. Against Marxism, this research recognizes a more diverse forms of economic change, social exploitation and popular struggle. And against post-structuralism, I aim to emphasize the importance and actuality of material practice, social exploitation and the subaltern assertion of social rights.

Notes 1 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), 2. 2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Abacus Books, 1994), 202. 3 Jacob M. Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt (Tel Aviv: Israel Publishing House, 1953), 50. 4 Robert Tignor’s modernizing colonial state was confronted with peasants congenitally incapable of recognizing the benefits of central government. Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 142. Vatikiotis’ Egyptian peasants are tradition-bound in that although they suffer tyranny, they are faulted for being incapable of constructing a political response based on modern political notions. Vatikiotis wrote: ‘That all peasants suffered . . . is . . . certain. But whether their resentment was couched in the political conception of national rebellion is another matter. As one Egyptian writer suggested, they rebelled frequently against oppression, tyranny, injustice (zulm); not for liberty or freedom.’ P.J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 160. See Nathan Brown’s discussion of the enduring strength of such characterizations of the peasantry in ‘The Ignorance and Inscrutability of the Egyptian Peasantry’, in Peasant and Politics in the Modern Middle East, ed. Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (Miami, FL: Florida International University Press, 1991), 203–21. But Brown himself saw Egyptian peasants as obsequious (p. 173) and as suffering from a personalistic view of politics (p. 166). Nathan J. Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: The Struggle Against the State (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990). Beyond the Middle East, Teodor Shanin even incorporates the notion of a ‘traditional culture’ into his very definition of the peasant in ed. Teodor Shanin, Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 15. 5 For example, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Donald Quataert and Eric van Zurcher (eds), Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, 1839–1950 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995). 6 See, for example, Zachary Lockman’s autocritique in Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, ed. Zachary Lockman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). Or, see Chandavarkar’s persuasive criticisms (directed above all at Dipesh Chakrabarty) of an Orientalist tendency to see India’s capitalist and working-class development as a kind of exception to a ‘normal’ pattern (established by Europe and European Marxism), and then to treat ‘culture’ in India as the variable that accounts for the deviation from the norm.

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7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1 ff. The peasants of colonial India, as depicted by Guha himself, were naïve, immature, and to some degree mired in traditional culture. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10–11, 28, 50, 170. Timothy Mitchell’s brilliant Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) has little to say about popular struggles for rights. James C. Scott defined ‘weapons of the weak’ as ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’ in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985), xvi. As in the authentic, revolutionary, and nationalist ‘people’, who appear in a rather abstract fashion in some of Egypt’s nationalist social history. For example, Latifa Muhammad Salim important work, Al-Quwa al-Ijtima’iyya fi al-Thawra al-‘Urabiyya (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1981). Although often seen as deviant from the Marxian model of primitive accumulation and proletarianization, the phenomenon of the ‘peasant-worker’ should rather be seen as a standard pattern under uneven economic change, especially in the colonial world. Zayn al-‘Abidin Shams al-Din Najm, Bur Sa‘id: Ta’rikhuha wa tatawwaruha mundhu nasha’tiha 1859 hatta ‘am 1882 (Cairo: al-Hay’a Al-Misriyya Al-‘amma li-l-Kitab, 1987), 36–8. For a brief description of coal-heavers’ social conditions, and allegations of their pilfering from the companies, see Royle/Malet, 12 (17 May 1882), PRO FO141/160 Najm, Bur Sa‘id, 77–86. John Chalcraft, ‘The Coal Heavers of Port Sa‘id: State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914’, International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 60 (Fall 2001): 110–24, 112. I mean disembedded in the sense meant by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time with a new introduction by Fred Block (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001 [first published 1944]). Fred Block’s introduction has a very useful discussion of embeddedness, xviii–xxxix. Chalcraft, ‘Coal-heavers’, 115. Najm, Bur Sa‘id, 79–80. Royle/Malet, pp. 13–14. Najm, Bur Sa‘id, 156–7. Royle/Cromer (25 May 1896), PRO FO141/322. Cromer wrote ‘I have received a very numerously signed Petition from the coalheavers at Port Said, complaining of the treatment they receive at the hands of their Sheikhs. They seem to have some real grievances, notably in connection with the truck system.’ Cromer/Royle (21 May 1896), PRO FO633/8. Cromer/Royle (27 May 1896), PRO FO633/8. I took up this case in some detail in my book The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 97–100. See Abraham Marcus’ particularly clear discussion in The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 178–9. This was the Governor of Alexandria’s summary of the porters’ claim Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya (The Egyptian National Archives, hereafter DWQ), Nizarat al-Dakhiliyya (Ministry of Interior, hereafter ND), Mukatibat ‘Arabi (Arabic correspondence, hereafter MA), Mahfaza (i.e. box, hereafter M) 8, Alexandria Governor/ Interior Minister 11 January 1872/29 Shawwal 1288. DWQ ND MA M8 Police/Alexandria Governor: 2 October 1871/17 Rajab 1288.

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27 Raymond does not mention the rukiyya and found little evidence for mutual assistance in the previous century. André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 Vols (Damas: Institut Français d’Etudes Arabes, 1973), 2: 567. Pascale Ghazaleh reported no mention of the term rukiyya, but documented a case where the porters of sugar implemented a communal division of income in 1720, in Pascale Ghazaleh, Masters of the Trade: Crafts and Craftspeople in Cairo, 1750–1850, Cairo papers in social science Vol. 22, No. 3 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 63. Juan R. I. Cole discovered a number of references to al-rukiyya in the 1870s related to porters, weighers and measurers in Alexandria – essentially the same set of disputes and practices to which I am referring here, in Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 71–5. The rukiyya existed in seventeenth-century Aleppo, Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 54. 28 DWQ ND MA M8 Police/Alexandria Governor: 2 October 1871/17 Rajab 1288. 29 Egypt Census of 1897: 9,661 measurers of cereals, 1,077 measurers and sifters in Cairo. The Cairo census of 1868 recorded 740 measurers and what were probably deckhands (kayyalin wa lawwahin). DWQ Muhafizat Misr, Ta‘dad Nufus 1285. ‘Ali Mubarak listed 497 measurers in Alexandria in 1877 – cited in ‘Abd Al-Salam ‘Abd Al-Halim ‘Amir, Tawa’if Al-Hiraf fi Misr, 1805–1914 (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-‘amma li-l-Kitab, 1993). Dhira’ is a length measure highly variable depending on products concerned; Edwin Lane has the following: dhira’ baladiyya (57.57 cm) for Egyptian cloth; dhira‘ al-hindasa (63.5 cm) for Indian cloth, and dhira‘ istanbuliyya (67.3 cm) for European cloth, in Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: East-West Publications, 1978 [first published 1836]). 30 According to Lane, the dry measure of volume, ardab, was equivalent to about 182 litres in the and divided into 6 waiba and/or 24 rub‘a. in ardab. Manners and Customs. 31 Egypt census 1897 lists 1,996 weighers in Egypt (practically all classed as Egyptian), and 275 weighers in Cairo, spread all over city, although 75 in Bulaq. The Cairo Census of 1868 lists 7 weighers of silver and gold, 511 guild of weighers (ta’ifat al-qabbaniyya), all but 9 of whom are ‘from the capital’, 6 from provinces, and 3 ‘Turks’. Twelve verifiers or makers of weights/measurers (ma‘ayrji) are also listed. DWQ Muhafizat Misr, Ta‘dad Nufus 1285. The principal unit of weight in 1800 was qantar – 44.35 KG – divided in 36 uqqa and/or 100 ratl (0.443 KG). Each Ratl is divided into 12 wuqiyya and/or 144 dirham of 3.08 grams. 32 Raymond, Artisans et commerçants, 275. 33 Summary of Regulations DWQ Majlis al-Khususi (hereafter MK) Wizarat (hereafter W) M1, No. 1. 34 A similar story stretches throughout the century. See John Chalcraft ‘Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions, and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth Century Egypt’ in Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony, ed. John Chalcraft and Yaseen Noorani (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 35 DWQ MK W M1, Mufattish ‘Umum al-Aqalim / Wakil Taftish Bahri, Muharram 1284/May 1867, No. 4. 36 DWQ MK W M1, Mudir Giza/ Taftish Aqalim Qibli, 23 Safar 1284/26 June 1867, No. 18. 37 DWQ ND MA M35, ‘Amir Zayyid and 33 companions/Interior Minister, Sha'ban 1297/ July 1880; DWQ ND MA M35, ‘Amir Zayyid and 32 companions/Interior Minister, Sha’ban 1297/ July 1880; DWQ ND MA M35, ‘Amir Zayyid and 32 companions/Interior Minister, Sha’ban 1297/July 1880. NB. These cultivators sent three petitions in fairly close succession. 38 ‘Amir Zayyid and 32 companions/Interior. 39 ‘Amir Zayyid and 33 companions/Interior.

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40 Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 164–89. John Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies. 76–80. See also John Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (Summer 2005): 303–25, especially 313–18. 41 Ibid. 42 Najm, Bur Sa‘id, 78–90. 43 Chalcraft, Striking Cabbies, 89–95. 44 DWQ ND MA (Mukatibat ‘Arabi) M20, 134 Bulaq measurers/ Interior Minister, Dhu al-Qa’ada 1293/ December 1876. 45 John Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State’, 313–18. 46 DWQ ND MA M10, Report from 58 Fallahin of hissat Badawi al-Dalu‘, Safar 1290/ April 1873. Hereafter Report from Fallahin. DWQ ND MA M10, Yusuf al-Ma‘dawi and 47 companions/ Khedive, Safar 1290/April 1873; DWQ ND MA M10, Ibrahim Radi and 15 companions/ Khedive, Safar 1290/April 1873; DWQ ND MA M10, Fallahin/ Khedive, 6 Safar 1290/4 April 1873. 47 DWQ ND MA M10, Inspector for Lower Egypt/ Interior Minister, 29 Safar 1290/27 April 1873. 48 Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 Vols (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 342–3. 49 Cromer, Modern Egypt, 343. Cromer firmly opposed the ‘extension of representative institutions’ in Egypt until the end of his rule. He wrote in 1907 that he was ‘very strongly of the opinion that any attempt to confer full parliamentary powers on the Council, would, for a long time to come, be the extreme of folly’. It would injure the ‘true interests of Egyptians’. Any parliament would demand debt reduction and increased public expenditure which would lead to ‘financial embarrassment’. The Council’s members had also not yet ‘acquired all those qualities necessary to give them the moral courage to assert their true opinions fearlessly’ – they are ‘terrorised by the local press’. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 277–8. 50 Landau, Parliaments and Parties, 41–2. 51 Sidney Low, Egypt in Transition (London: Smith Elder, 1914), 241. Low’s words here are supposed to be admiring. 52 Cromer, Modern Egypt, Vol. 2, 274. 53 See Alexander Schölch, ‘Constitutional Development in Nineteenth Century Egypt – A Reconsideration’, Middle Eastern Studies 10 (January 1974): 3–14. 54 Rafi‘i, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-, Misr wa al-Sudan fi Awa’il ‘Ahd al-Ihtilal, 1882–1892 [first published 1942] (Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1983), 52. 55 Al-Rafi‘i, ‘Ahd al-Ihtilal, 47–54. 56 Sheldon Amos, ‘The New Egyptian Constitution’ in The Contemporary Review 43 (January–June, 1883): 909–22, 921. Few historians have seen it this way. For Landau, the advance of parliamentarianism had been ‘halted’. Landau, Parliaments, 69. For Jacques Berque the new regime constituted a ‘retrogression’. Jacques Berque, Imperialism and Revolution 1st published 1967, Jean Stewart (trans.) (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 251. 57 Amos, ‘Egyptian Constitution’, 913. 58 The British saw peasant apathy over voting as proof of racial docility and deviant character with regard to the exercise of power: as Lord Milner noted in 1892 speaking of ‘the docile disposition of the race’, ‘There is nothing in the character of the people to check the abuse of power, nothing to guide its exercise.’ Cited in Nathan J. Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: The Struggle Against the State (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 149. As Brown wrote, ‘Peasants were left only with the choice of which notable would represent them,’ p. 153. 59 Gabriel Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 32. Baer took a positive view of this development, speaking

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60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

of the government as having ‘won back its authority’ in selection procedures as against outsize local power and autonomy. Baer, Social History, 33 and 59. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 36. Tignor, Modernization, 135–6. Baer, Social History, 58. Tignor, Modernization, 207. Further powers followed. In 1923 ‘umdas became judiciary police officers, Berque, Imperialism, 378, and in the 1920s they were granted a tax exemption on five acres of their land. Tignor, Modernization, 210. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 192–6. Ibid., 186. Berque, Imperialism, 252. Lord Dufferin had argued that the development of self-government should begin at the local level. ‘Local self-government is the fittest preparation and most convenient stepping-stone for anything approaching to a constitutional régime.’ This is a quotation from Dufferin’s report. Cited in Cromer, Modern Egypt, Vol 2, 275. Cromer claimed that much had been done in this area. He meant the extension of the powers of Municipalities and Local Commissions, but not the extension of forms of local democracy. Cromer, Modern Egypt, Vol. 2, 276. D. Mackenzie Wallace, Egypt and the Egyptian Question (London: Macmillan, 1883), 207. Berque, Imperialism, 253. Baer, Social History, 33–5. Berque, Imperialism, 530–1. Ibid., 378. Ibid., Imperialism, 644–5. Ibid., 644. As is so often attested ‘the Western powers, without exception, failed to accept that freedom and equality which the reformers had so hopefully anticipated’. This, surprisingly perhaps, is Bernard Lewis writing in the Foreword to Landau, Parliaments and Parties. Berque, Imperialism, 644. Reem Saad, ‘State, Landlord, Parliament and Peasant: The Story of the 1992 Tenancy Law in Egypt’, in Agriculture in Egypt: From Pharaonic to Modern Times, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Eugene Rogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 387–404. Gabriel Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1964).

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4 WORKLESS REVOLUTIONARIES The unemployed movement in revolutionary Iran Asef Bayat

Introduction: the revolution On February 11, 1979 Tehran radio announced the victory of the Iranian revolution with feverish jubilation. This report marked the end of the 2,500-year-old monarchy. In a wave of ecstasy, the populace rushed into the streets en masse. Women milled through the crowd handing out candies and sharbat (sweet drinks). Drivers sounded their horns in unison, flashing their lights as they drove down the main streets that had been the scene of bloody clashes between the protesters and the army only days before. These same streets were now being patrolled by the revolutionary militias ( pasdaran). For those present, this scene signified an unprecedented victory. The victory day was the culmination of over eighteen months of mass demonstrations, bloody confrontations, large-scale industrial actions, a general strike, and many political maneuvers.1 The revolution’s roots lay in the structural changes arising from the gradual modernization that had been under way in Iran since the 1930s. In 1953, the process accelerated dramatically after the coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), overthrowing nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstating the Shah. The modernization policy and economic change, initiated by the state under both Reza Shah (1925–1946) and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, resulted in the growth of new social forces to the dismay of the traditional social groups. By the 1970s, the large and well-to-do modern middle class, modern youth, and women who participated in public life and an industrial working class – in addition to a new poor comprising slum and squatter dwellers – dominated the social scene. With the exception of the group living in abject poverty, these crowds represented the beneficiaries of the economic progress and enjoyed an increase in status and commensurate economic rewards. The persistence of the Shah’s age-old autocracy, however, prevented these thriving social layers from participating in the political process. This exclusion angered the new elite. At the same time, the old social groups – a segment of the traditional bazaaris or merchants, the old urban middle strata, the declining clergy, and the adherents of Islamic institutions – were also frustrated by the modernization strategy, which undermined their economic interests and power bases. 91

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The repressive closure of all the institutional channels to any expression of discontent increasingly alienated the populace from the state. In the meantime, corruption, inefficiency, a sense of injustice, and a feeling of cultural outrage marked the social psychology of many Iranians. During the tense 1970s, at the height of the Shah’s authoritarian rule and the remarkable economic growth, many people (with the possible exception of the upper class and landed peasantry) were therefore dissatisfied, albeit for different reasons. All blamed the Shah and his Western allies, especially the United States, for such state of affairs. Little surprise, then, that the language of dissent and protests was largely anti-monarchy, anti-imperialist, Third Worldist, and even nationalist, and turned into a religious discourse in the end. The opportunity for popular mobilization arrived with what we used to call the “Carterite breeze” (nasseem-e Carteri). In the 1970s, President Carter’s human rights policy forced the Shah to offer limited freedom of political expression. This expression gradually mounted and swept aside the monarchy in less than two years. It began with a limited relaxation of censorship, allowing some literary and intellectual activities (at the Goethe Institute and the universities in Tehran) and public gatherings by the Islamists (in Quba Mosque). The next step concerned the distribution by the intellectuals and liberal politicians of letters of open criticism to high-ranking officials. During this stage, an article in the daily Ettilaat insulting Ayatollah Khomeini triggered a manifestation in the shrine city of Qum in which some of the demonstrators were killed. To commemorate the tragedy, a large-scale demonstration took place in the Azeri city of Tabriz in the north. This gathering marked the beginning of a chain of events that formed a nationwide revolutionary movement with mass participation from diverse segments of the population (modern and traditional, religious and secular, men and women) which was led by the ulama (the Shi’i clergy). Since the coup of 1953, over twenty-five years of the Shah’s autocracy had removed or destroyed almost all effective secular independent political associations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The coup crushed both the nationalist and the communist movements; the secret police (SAVAK) infiltrated trade unions; publications were strictly censored; and hardly any effective NGOs remained in existence.2 The main organized political dissent came from the underground guerrilla organizations, Marxist Fedaian and radical Islamic Mujahedin, whose activities were limited to isolated armed operations.3 Likewise, student activism was confined to campus politics inside the country and to efforts by Iranian students abroad. In short, the organizational means of the severely dissatisfied secular groupings were decapitated. Unlike the secular forces, however, the clergy had the comparative advantage of possessing invaluable institutional capacity, including its own hierarchical order, over 10,000 mosques, husseiniehs, huwzehs, and associations maintaining vital links of communication among the revolutionary contenders. Young Islamists – both girls and boys along with young clergymen – linked the institution of the

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ulama to the people. A hierarchical order facilitated unified decision-making and a systematic flow of orders and information; and in mosques higher-level decisions were disseminated among both the activists and the general public. In short, this institutional capacity in addition to the remarkable ambiguity in the clergy’s message secured the ulama’s leadership. In the final phase of the revolution (December 1978–February 1979), under Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, a host of leftists, labor activists, students, women, and ethnic groups took advantage of the dual power situation and began to mobilize. Yet they hardly influenced the leadership’s religious composition. Their political impact was to come during the first two years after the revolution. Thus, the “Islamization” progressed largely from above by the Islamic state after the victory of the Islamic revolution. The process entailed the establishment of the velayat-i faqih (rule of the clergy), the Islamic legal system, restrictive policies toward women, “Islamic” cultural practices, and social demeanor. In the weeks and months following the day of victory, the joy and jubilation made way for a widespread sense of uncertainty about the future. The women who had previously appeared without veils felt betrayed by those who imposed mandatory veiling. In response, the women staged remarkable street demonstrations in Tehran on March 8–12, 1979. Ethnic groups (Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, and Iranian Arabs) – by now widely mobilized – soon felt the new regime’s iron grip when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the suppression of identity politics in the summer of 1979. Secular leftists and liberals quickly experienced the intolerance of the Islamic regime. The Tudeh Communist Party resumed work after years in exile. Marxist Fedaii guerrillas and the radical Islamic Mujahedin emerged from the underground and began overt political activity. Dozens of new splinter groups – Maoist, Trotskyite, Libertarian, and Marxist – were added to the existing Marxist– Leninist organizations. While the Tudeh was more conciliatory toward the new ruling clergy, its general relationship with the radical left (i.e. the Fedaian and Maoist groups) remained hostile. Indeed, immediately after the revolution, the clergy and the left competed fiercely in mobilizing the populace. Thus the universities, urban neighborhoods, factories, farms, and street corners turned into sites of contention between the supporters of the left and the Mujahedin versus the pro-regime groupings such as the pasdaran (informal volunteer militias that were later institutionalized), Islamic associations, and many dozens of well-organized street thugs known as the hizbullahis. The seizure of the US Embassy by Muslim students (November 4, 1979) and the outbreak of war with Iraq (September 22, 1980) undoubtedly undermined the leftist and liberal dissent for the cause of national unity against external threat. Nevertheless, their activities continued until the summer of 1981, when the bloody street battles between the government forces and the Mujahedin (June 20, 1981) led to widespread suppression of all kinds of opposition.4

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The unemployed were among those whose revolutionary romanticism was dashed before long by the harsh realities of daily need. This chapter chronicles the story of this subaltern group and the effort of its members to secure work and social protection in 1979, the most turbulent period in postrevolutionary Iran.

The revolution and the unemployed The victory of the revolution gave rise to unprecedented urban unemployment in Iran.5 Hundreds of companies, businesses, and factories suspended operations. The owners and managers of these ventures, foreign and Iranian alike, had left the country months before the insurrections of February 10–11, 1979. Those who remained in the country shut down their enterprises in the midst of chaos pending the economic policy of the new revolutionary government. Labor strikes, which escalated after October 1978, had almost crippled industry, public services, and government offices. Hardest hit was the construction sector, where hundreds of projects were abandoned mid-way. Cranes and tools lay idle on the lots of half-finished building complexes, and work sites remained deserted. In the end, thousands of laborers who had withdrawn their labor for the victory of the revolution found themselves without jobs on its morrow. These jobless were joined by a new army of unemployed: those working in ideologically unfit occupations. Western-style restaurants, cafeterias, cabarets, liquor stores, red-light district theaters, and brothels were all closed down, not only because they were incompatible with the Islamic revolution but also because they were deemed symbolic of the decadence of the ancien regime. In Tehran alone, an estimated 3,000 employees of such establishments lost their jobs.6 The lottery ticket company was shut down entirely, laying off 200,000 low-income street ticket sellers. The arrival of about 150,000 high school graduates (diplomehs) gradually swelled the ranks of the unemployed. In the very first year after the revolution, therefore, some 2.5 million Iranians, equal to 21 percent of the workforce, were out of work.7 According to an official survey of Tehran unemployed, well over one half of the jobless were laid off owing to closures. Ten percent consisted of casual laborers who left their jobs because of low income and hardship. The rest of the unemployed comprised migrants and high school graduates seeking work for the first time.8 In short, between 1.5 and 2 million people lost their jobs within a few months of the revolutionary events. The jobless were a heterogeneous group. While factory workers and high school graduates led the protests, the articulation of interests and discontent with an extraordinary condition drew many poor unemployed, casual laborers, and rural migrants into an audible and collective street politics. In developing countries, organized struggle by the unemployed for jobs and protection is extremely rare, notwithstanding high rates of open and invisible joblessness. Family, kinship, patron–client relationships, and especially the informal sector provide essential mechanisms for protection and survival; lack of organization generally prevents the development of sustained protest movements.9 94

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In this chapter, I argue that the conjuncture-based articulation of resources and political opportunity underlying the movement set the Iranian case apart. The resources included the postrevolutionary massive and sudden loss of jobs along with the emergence of a revolutionary ideology among the jobless. The simultaneous sudden decline in the standard of living and general expectations caused a moral outrage. The movement was perceived as the continuation of a broader revolutionary struggle. Optimism had surged among the poor and the unemployed; the intense competition between the ruling clergy and the leftist opposition to recruit the support of the poor raised hopes still further. This ideological dimension was the driving force behind the huge pool of jobless who utilized both the existing relative political freedom and the mobilization skills they had acquired during the revolution.

The onset Some three months prior to the victory of the revolution, over 13,000 seasonal or project workers in the city of Abadan, a large oil port city in the south, became redundant when their companies discontinued operations. The workers had lost their jobs but considered their unemployment insignificant compared to the revolutionary struggles around them. Even those who still held their jobs were on strike. Yet, for these workers, the extraordinary days of unity and sacrifice were coming to an end. The revolution was entering a new stage in which groups and individuals would reveal their true colors. The factionalism and struggle for power among the new leaders grew as the clerical leadership started exhibiting intolerance toward dissenting political voices. As the days passed, these workers began thinking about their precarious present and uncertain future. During the unstable premiership of Shahpour Bakhtiar (the last prime minister appointed by the Shah), a small number of these workers gathered frequently in local tea houses to discuss their plight and to decide on a course of action. Out of these and subsequent meetings emerged the Syndicate of the Unemployed Project Workers of Abadan (SUPW). This solidarity marked the start of collective actions taken by the unemployed. Within five months, the campaigns successfully secured jobs and unemployment benefits.10 Several demonstrations, all repressed by the pasdaran, were organized in pursuit of these objectives. Two months later, on April 13, 1979, as social struggles intensified, some 400 laborers resorted to a sit-in in the syndicate headquarters and threatened to go on a hunger strike.11 The protest movement of the unemployed was well under way in several big cities including Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Ghazvin, Gachsaran, and the province of Kurdistan. In Tehran, the leftist organizations had initially mobilized several redundant and expelled worker groups (kargaran-i bikaar-shudeh). Before long they joined forces in a loosely knit Organization of Unemployed and Seasonal Workers, which included laborers laid off from manufacturing, construction, and other industries. 95

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Campaigns in Tehran On March 2, 1979, a small group of laid-off workers gathered in the Ministry of Labor to publicize their plight. Labor Minister Dariush Foruhar – a liberal follower of Mosaddeq – addressed the gathering. Disappointed in the minister, the workers concluded their protest by reading a resolution which called for job creation, a meeting place for a syndicate organization, a 40-hour work week, and unemployment benefits. Soon the group returned better prepared and with over 2,000 members. Over the next two weeks, they visited the ministry more than five times. During the subsequent meetings they also demanded recognition for their organization and national radio and television coverage of their grievances.12 Facing mounting pressure in its first few weeks in office, the Ministry of Labor decided to establish an “unemployed loan fund.” The plan envisioned loans of between Rls 7,500 and Rls 9,000 per month for a maximum of six months. Workers aged 26–60 who had paid social security for at least one year would be eligible.13 This requirement effectively excluded casual laborers and recent high school graduates. In the debate that followed, the unemployed turned down this concession, demanding that the age and social security contribution requirements be eliminated. They further insisted that the payments be based on family size, and that representatives of the unemployed supervise the program. Most importantly, they demanded that the loan concept (vaam-i bikaari) be changed to a benefit plan (haqq-i bikaari). In the meeting, a worker who had been laid off from the Tehran bus services, Sherkat-i Vahid echoed the concern of those who considered the loan idea a sellout for the working-class struggle as a whole: We represent all the suffering Iranian workers. Our demand is not an individual claim. Unfortunately, it was announced today that everybody will receive one thousand tumans and abandon the cause [. . .]14 Is it really fair to let these few pennies spoil the spirit of workers’ struggle? How can they call themselves workers, those whose character is worth only one thousand tumans? [. . .] One hundred thousand were killed [for the revolution], and still our demands are not met!15 A representative of the unemployed offered his support in rejecting the plan. Addressing the laborers, he said: you are the source of our power. We will act according to your decisions. I am glad that the group has consciously expressed its criticism and unwillingness to accept the offer. This decision proves that hunger is not our only concern [. . .] Rationality must prevail. Faith, conviction, and consciousness give us power.16 The loan versus benefits issue became the fundamental source of confrontation between the unemployed and the Provisional Government. Undoubtedly, the left 96

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was instrumental in articulating and radicalizing the workers’ demands. As people who had supported and endured hardships during the revolution, this group of unemployed felt entitled to impose demands on the new leadership. The influence of the left on their movement did not affect their conviction that their demands were legitimate. The Provisional Government, however, considered their demands unacceptable. Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan associated this movement with communist currents attempting to undermine his government, especially since the left had characterized the government as liberal and pro-capitalist.17 Moreover, the government did not want to assume the huge responsibility of permanently feeding the unemployed.18 The Labor Minister insisted that the term “loan” could not be changed. On March 12, 1979 he told the workers’ representatives: “I do not want to suggest that this is a grant without any repayment due. Workers’ honor is above charity. I want this plan to be understood merely as a loan.”19 Following a meeting on March 17, therefore, over 3,000 jobless laborers began a sit-in in the labor ministry compound. When subsequent negotiations with the ministry proved futile, some 700 participants went on a hunger strike in the afternoon in their frustration and anguish.20 Three days later, in an effort to mobilize support from other citizens, they issued a statement that was distributed in Tehran: We are the unemployed workers who have staged a sit-in at the Ministry of Labor. Since the authorities have not responded to our demands, we have been on a hunger strike since March 17 (1:00 a.m.) and will pursue our strike to the point of our death, unless our grievances are considered. We request that our laboring brothers distribute this note and publicize our situation among the working people, so that they may all join us. As we finish this writing, [the authorities] have come to us shooting their guns.21 Immediately after the hunger strike started, the Labor Minister met with the workers’ representatives at 1.00 a.m. An hour of negotiations failed to bring an agreement. A spokesperson for the strikers indicated that the minister had insisted on the loan issue, which was unacceptable to the strikers.22 An additional attempt was made to appease the strikers, this time by a clergyman who tried to impose his religious authority. His appeals, however, fell upon deaf ears, and the workers continued their sit-in.23 On the first night, hizbullahis (pro-regime street thugs) marched into the ministry to attack the strikers. Outside the compound, leftist students joined groups of unemployed workers to express their solidarity with the strikers despite repeated clashes with the pro-regime thugs.24 Inside, however, frustration and determination to continue the struggle characterized the protesters. Workers felt betrayed and cheated by the new politicians whom they had trusted. They sensed a kind of moral outrage and suspected their leaders of violating the tacit social contract that had evolved in the course of the revolution. They expected respect as well as material rewards, 97

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but felt they had obtained neither.25 Zahra Dorostkar, one of the women strikers, angrily vented this feeling at the compound: I want to know why radio and television do not broadcast our grievances to inform the world of our sufferings and to make them appreciate how little [the authorities] are offering us. If they broadcast this injustice, the people will no longer be misinformed [by the government] that pretends to give us our due. We have gathered here and are on a hunger strike because we want unemployment benefits [haqq-i bikaari]. We do not expect charity. If there are jobs, we are prepared to work. Otherwise, our living expenses must be insured. We all cried out that we wanted Mr Khomeini; we supported the religious leaders. Now we expect them to address our problems. I have two children; my husband has worked for the last six months but has not been paid; they say, “we don’t have any money!” I used to work in the Vitana [a biscuit factory in Tehran]. I was forced to resign because they did not accept my children in their nursery. Now, [the Labor Ministry] tells us “take one thousand tumans for the time being!” I have not paid my rent for the last six months; we hardly have any food at home; my children are without clothes [. . .] What can I do with these one thousand tumans? I am telling you, I will not leave this place unless [the authorities] consider my living conditions.26 While the laborers carried on their hunger strike, the negotiations with the authorities continued. The strike leaders had sensed that the Provisional Government was not prepared to back down. Some pro-government elements had begun to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy. The loan offer undoubtedly exacerbated the differences between the laborers adhering to a political ideology and their counterparts driven by economic and social considerations. To make matters worse, sustaining a hunger strike against a government which had just emerged as the victor in the revolution, was not easy. On New Year’s Day, the pasdaran broke into the compound, attacking the strikers and spreading terror by continuously shooting their guns in the air.27 A number of hunger strikers passed out and were taken to hospitals; others were given glucose.28 The strike leaders relented and eventually agreed to the loan principle. The remaining differences revolved only around the provisions of the loan. The parties finally reached a compromise on March 22, 1979. According to the agreement, each unemployed person was to be granted a monthly payment of Rls 9,000–12,000, with an advance payment of some Rls 10,000. The conditions for the payment were substantially modified. In addition, the unemployed succeeded in having the Khane-ye Kargar (House of Labor) recognized as their organizational headquarters in Tehran.29

The escalation of collective actions The government hoped that the compromise would end the protest among the unemployed. Peace, however, did not return under the Provisional Government. 98

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Both the government and the unemployed knew that loans would not solve the misery of joblessness. The government’s concession was primarily intended to pacify the jobless crowd. While the authorities privately assumed that the workers would not pay back the loans, they hoped the measure would defuse the protests from the unemployed. Similarly, the unemployed and their leftist leaders did not regard the payment as a loan but as a mere piecemeal monetary gain. In addition, the Tehran agreement had omitted a large number of casual laborers and recent high school graduates from its provisions.30 The agreement ended the hunger strike in Tehran but failed to halt the protest actions of the unemployed in general. The campaign continued. During the following three months the protest movement of the jobless escalated in different parts of the country. The organizations of the jobless in some regions flatly rejected the Tehran compromise; others continued their protests notwithstanding their desire to obtain the “loan.” In the meantime, the migrant poor and the school leavers not covered by the “loan” became even more aggressive. On April 1, 1979, less than two weeks after the initial agreement, over 3,000 jobless convened an open meeting in the Labor House. Outdoor loudspeakers broadcast the debates in the streets. The meeting condemned the “loan” plan once again and resolved to continue the campaign. An unemployed speaker angrily echoed the crowd’s mood: I would never have accepted the [Labor] minister’s promise and would never have agreed to appear on television even to the point of death, had I sensed that [ending] our hunger strike would lead to this hopeless situation. I would rather die than face this situation. [. . .] We want neither a free ride nor charity. Give us work.31 The crowd subsequently staged a five-day sit-in within the Ministry of Justice. It ended only with liberal Justice Minister Asadullahi’s promise to take the issue to the cabinet. He also helped the unemployed publicize their grievances on national radio and television.32 The SUPWA focused its campaigns on consolidating its position and struggled to dislodge the rival Union of Workers and High School Graduates created by the local authorities to undermine the SUPWA. Meanwhile, the syndicate continued negotiating with local and national officials to win concessions from the government. Some three weeks after the Tehran agreement, in the same region, the Unemployed Workers of Ahwaz and Vicinity rejected the Labor Ministry’s plan and demanded unemployment benefits instead.33 Only a few days after the Tehran agreement, in the southeastern city of Khorramabad, hundreds of jobless laborers occupied the governorate’s offices demanding jobs, an unemployment fund and headquarters for their assemblies. The protesters were attacked by pro-government forces, especially the pasdaran of Komite-ye Imam, violently assaulted and fired upon.34 The unemployed crowd 99

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in the industrial city of Gazvin initiated collective action by electing representatives to negotiate with city authorities. Demoralized by the ensuing request that they “wait two more months,” they went on protest marches and organized gatherings in local mosques to discuss their strategy.35 On March 28 in the northwestern Azeri city of Tabriz, hundreds of unemployed and laid-off workers staged a sit-in lasting several days on the premises of bashgah-i kargaran, the Workers’ Club.36 Another group marched into Tabriz’s radio and television station to force the authorities to publicize their grievances. Some two weeks earlier, the jobless had already been mobilized by left-wing activists and had voiced their grievances in a number of gatherings. One of the meetings culminated in a resolution calling for an immediate return to work, the establishment of a benefit fund for the unemployed and the assignment of a permanent headquarter.37 Similar sit-ins and protest marches took place in Shahr-i Kord and Sari in April and May.38 In each city, the frequent rejection of the demands or delayed response by the authorities prolonged such protest actions. The violent reaction of the security forces further escalated the protests. The Union of the Unemployed Workers of Isfahan and Vicinity (UUWIV), established in March 1979, had also rejected the minister’s loan provisions and made a number of other demands, giving the officials two weeks to respond. When a favorable response was not forthcoming, some 7,000 unemployed and their supporters organized a protest demonstration on March 26, 1979. They carried banners reading “the toiling masses assumed the burden of the revolution, but others have reaped the benefits.” They called for government recognition of the Council of Unemployed Workers and their right to assemble.39 The demonstrators were blocked by the pasdaran and by hizbullahis wielding clubs and knives. The governor rebuffed the demonstrators, and the pasdaran arrested a number of organizers. In an effort to pressurize the authorities further, another protest march of some 10,000 marchers gathered in front of Isfahan’s House of Labor less than two weeks later to demand direct talks with the governor. The negotiations yielded no tangible results, and the marches continued. According to a rumor, the demonstrators intended to attack the police station. In the ensuing violent confrontations with the security forces, one demonstrator (Naser Tawfiqian) was killed, 8 others injured and nearly 300 detained.40 These collective protests were not always in vain: at times, desirable outcomes resulted. In the Kurdish towns, for example, where the left and the Kurdish nationalist organizations enjoyed mass support, the protests were fiercer and consequently more successful. In Mahabad, the capital city of Kurdistan province, the employees of the power and water supply who had been laid off during the revolution managed to regain their jobs following a bitter struggle. The Fedaii Organization appears to have been crucial in this success and launched appeals to the jobless in other areas.41 In Sanandaj, following intense negotiations with various municipal authorities, temporary measures served to assist the

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jobless population of nearly 7,000 and included immediate employment of 500, payment of benefits to those laid off and loans for others until reemployment.42 In late May 1979, the unemployed of Kermanshah were mobilized by young socialist activists. Recent high school graduates, the unemployed poor, some groups of parents, and other sympathizers joined forces in street demonstrations and sit-ins. They organized some of the largest protest marches in the city, with the number of participants in one demonstration reaching 5,000.43 In one incident that month, the demonstrators intended to launch a sit-in in the governorate headquarters. Despite opposition from the guards, the demonstrators broke the gate and seized the building for a few hours. This action forced the governor, who had already fled the building, to return and listen to the crowd. The protesters agreed to end their sit-in only following the governor’s assurances that he would seriously consider their demands. Before long, joint planning by the governor and the Union of the Unemployed (an elected body) resulted in the reopening of a house-building factory which was able to employ some hundred people. The plan also provided jobs at Kashmir Factory to another group of unemployed. The remaining jobless were to be compensated between Rls 7,000 and 15,000 per month until they found work.44 Although the unemployed were mobilized in almost every town where workers had been laid off, the movement remained dispersed and isolated for the most part. Nonetheless, the protest actions of the unemployed culminated in a massive show of unity and force on May Day 1979. Some 500,000 people marched through Tehran and many more took to the streets in other provincial cities. The rally, organized by the May Day Coordination Council (a committee composed of various socialist and labor organizations), was the biggest independent gathering of the working class in years. Groups of men and women, parents and children marched hand in hand through the city’s main streets chanting slogans. May Day showed the strength of the working class and especially the left. The massive numbers mobilized were “their” forces. Young male activists held hands along both sides of the march, thereby creating a human chain to shield the demonstrators from the occasional assaults by organized thugs (the informal groupings under the protection of some powerful mullahs). A number of state organizations, such as the Sepah-i pasdaran, the Jihad-i Sazandegui (the Construction Crusade), and the Islamic Republican Party, issued statements about May Day; some took part in the marches as well. The focus of these groups, however, lay on the “danger of Communism,” the “agents of the United States” (referring to socialist activists), and Wahdat-i Kalameh (the unity of the Islamic Ummah) rather than on specifically labor-related issues.45 The unemployed accounted for a substantial portion of the demonstrators. The slogans reflected the strategy of the organizers: “The struggle of the unemployed is not separate from that of the employed workers.” The march ended with the reading of a resolution praising Ayatollah Khomeini and calling for, among other things, the nationalization of industry and banking, changes in labor legislation, and the expulsion of foreign experts.46

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The variety of street protests Not surprisingly, jobs were the main concern of the jobless. During the first five months after the revolution, eighty-six major collective actions by workers protested lockouts and layoffs and campaigned for their return to work. This series of efforts was the largest group (some 20 percent of all campaigns) among the industrial actions waged by the working people.47 Yet the variety of demands reflected the unemployed movement leadership’s strategy of relating the struggle for jobs to other political and social concerns of the working class. Socialist leaders highlighted well-known demands, such as the 40-hour work week, better working conditions, equal pay for men and women, and the right to strike. Whether the demands were intended simply to radicalize the movement or had received careful consideration as to their possible implications remains unclear. Certainly, the insistence in almost every campaign on headquarters indicates the value placed on organizational work. Some demands (such as expulsion of foreign experts) contradicted the central concern for saving jobs; the withdrawal of foreign companies was partly responsible for many closures and layoffs. The protest actions mainly took the form of demonstrations, sit-ins and the issuing of resolutions. The demonstrations voiced the plight of the jobless both to fellow citizens and to the authorities. Some groups forced the local radio and television stations to publicize their grievances. Demonstrations were also staged as a means of collective action and protest. In the postrevolutionary conditions, however, where street marching had become commonplace, their immediate impact was less than satisfactory. Sit-ins (tahassun and ishghal ), or temporary occupation of a public premise and disruptive conduct, prevailed as a pressure tactic. The buildings of the Labor Ministry, local labor offices, the governorates and the Ministry of Justice were the main targets. The occasional practice of combining sit-ins with hunger strikes resulted in some immediate gains. Although tahassun seems to be an established custom in Iran, the practices of the unemployed are unlikely to have drawn on this history. Traditionally, in bast-nishini, the actors seek refuge in holy places, such as shrines or mosques, in an attempt to seek forgiveness, stage a protest, and pursue justice. The act represents a defensive cry for clemency and justice, normally by one suffering under arbitrary rule.48 Thus, a perpetrator of a crime would seek refuge in a shrine where he would enjoy immunity as long as he remained in asylum. The connotations of the contemporary repertoire are essentially different. The unemployed referred to their acts not by the traditional term (bast-nishini) but in terms of tahassun (sit-in) and ishghal (occupation, squatting). For the unemployed, the terms had a different meaning and signified a form of collective action through which the actors sought either publicity for a cause or, more often, a method of disruption to bring public pressure to bear on the authorities.49 Nevertheless, some symbolic elements of the traditional concepts remain. For instance, the unemployed did organize sit-ins in places such as the headquarters of Workers’ Syndicates or the House of Labor without any disruptive intent. Similarly, staging

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a sit-in in front of the Ministry of Justice was a cry for justice in a more traditional sense. In spite of the large number of sit-ins, no evidence is available from Iran of direct actions such as mob looting or rent riots. Historically, these measures result from a sudden drop in income and a lack of alternative means of survival. Rapid, massive, and unexpected unemployment may produce such phenomena, as evidenced during the depression in the United States.50 In Iran, though, as in most developing countries, people are better prepared to adopt survival strategies relatively quickly. Kinship, friendship, patronage, and especially informal economic activities are the most convenient mechanisms. In Iran those who had already been unemployed were equipped with coping techniques, and those recently laid off could rely in part on the support of their kin members in searching for alternative employment. The unemployed also launched a fund-raising campaign, albeit on a limited scale. The contributions came largely from working people who still held their jobs. Significantly, the bazaar – a major source of funds during the revolution – was of no assistance.51 “Unemployment loans,” however meager, provided immediate relief. As long as the jobless believed they could gain ground through collective resistance, they refrained from limiting their actions to individualist operations and survival strategies. As long as the unemployed poor lacked any institutional setting in which they could take direct action, such as the workplace, they needed to resort to collective protest. This interest in collective activity – encouraged by the leftist groups – paved the way toward some degree of association-type activities among the jobless.

Getting organized The struggle of the jobless was somewhat disorganized. For one thing, the unemployed were not a homogeneous group. Their varied backgrounds meant that their capacities for mobilization and collective action differed. As indicated earlier, the jobless population comprised three main groups: laid-off and suspended workers, recent graduates, and already jobless and casual laborers. No organizational link between them was conceivable. The laid-off workers had largely been employed in factories or on construction sites. Whereas a common workplace gave this group some basis for communication, the other two groups tended to be scattered, lacking even a physical location to gather. Within these categories, individuals met briefly and accidentally. Leaders of the groups were often chosen spontaneously following little deliberation or competition. At times excitement prevailed over rational decisions and calculated actions. As one participant commented, “[w]e had not decided to occupy the Labor Ministry; it just happened. We were only demonstrating in the streets; chanting slogans; people got very excited; all of a sudden we were jumping over the fences.”52 Nevertheless, some degree of organization and coordination could be observed. Two factors underlay this development: simple necessity and the role of mobilizers.

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Organizational necessity Above all, before demonstrations and sit-ins, and instead of looting or rioting, the unemployed relied on the disposition of the new authorities. Negotiating was their initial strategy of preference. This approach required appointing representatives (as in the cities of Ghazvin, Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Kermanshah). If negotiations did not bring results, the unemployed made sure to maintain some kind of communication and network to continue their campaign. To this end, they needed, first, a place to assemble and, second, recognition of their representatives by the authorities. They believed that such recognition would protect them from the arbitrary assaults by the pasdaran and others. These formal groupings of unemployed workers received different labels depending on the perception of the leaders. Among the most common names were shura (council), sandika (syndicate), and kaanun (center). Some groups went beyond merely appointing representatives and attempted to form a more durable structure for their organizations. When the jobless in Isfahan realized that securing jobs was more complicated than they had imagined, they began to consolidate their organization by involving unemployed workers from the entire city and its environs in the UUWIV. In Tehran, when the initial negotiations with the Ministry of Labor failed, jobless leaders gathered in the House of Labor to plan a more structured organization on March 5, 1979. This meeting was followed by the formation of a Steering Committee of Casual/Seasonal Workers and by official recognition of the House of Labor as their permanent headquarters on March 22, 1979. The House of Labor became a significant institution for the laboring poor. The House of Labor had originally been taken over by the unemployed under strong influence from the Paykar Organization, a Maoist group. Its early meetings, which were open to all, covered various topics. These general meetings were often both dynamic and chaotic, drawing crowds of 300 to 400, and to remedy this problem separate workshops were sometimes held. As political groups became more involved, some disciplinary standards were introduced: discussions became more organized, speakers more articulate and, simultaneously, ideological divisions more pronounced. Speakers espousing a specific line of politics were heckled by opponents and cheered by sympathizers. The ambitiously formulated slogans hanging on the background wall (“The Only Solution for the Toiling Masses is Unity and Organization” and “Workers’ Democracy Is Limitless”) seemed to have lost their resonance. The debates initiated by militants tended to center on issues such as “democratic vs socialist revolution” and “economic vs political struggles,” which appeared less relevant to the daily concerns of the unemployed.53 Notwithstanding the subjects of the debates, official recognition of the House of Labor signified both a practical and a symbolic victory for the laboring poor: it legitimized their organizational activities and their capacity for independent collective action. Many used the House of Labor as a personal shelter: “Some would spend nights there; others would bring food and share with fellow laborers.

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Some individuals came to the House for their lunch breaks and discussed topics of interest. In this way, many simple-minded lads experienced class solidarity. The House had practically turned into a school for collective action [. . .].”54 The organized activities of the jobless extended beyond the House of Labor. A number of associations for the unemployed were founded as well. Unemployed workers in the oil and port city of Abadan in southern Iran formed a more elaborate organization known as the Syndicate of Project/Seasonal Workers of Abadan (SPWA). As mentioned earlier, the foundations of the syndicate were laid in the casual gatherings of laborers at the local tea houses (Bushehri-ha), where preparatory registration and campaigning began weeks before the insurrection. The next step involved the assembly of a group of workers in the Oil Industry College that resulted in a steering committee (shura-ye muassess). The committee began recruiting members by using tea houses as their meeting points. At this stage, obtaining a permanent headquarters topped the agenda. Following intense negotiations and confrontations with city officials, the members secured the stateowned premises of the former Workers Union as their headquarters.55 They also registered the SPWA with the Komite-ye Imam, the local pasdaran and the office of the Governorate.56 The SPWA managed to organize over 13,000 unemployed workers from twenty different trades, representing various skills and income levels.57 The steering committee produced a set of by-laws based on the union experiences in newly independent Algeria, postrevolutionary Nicaragua and Iran during the 1940s. The most pressing tasks concerned negotiations with employers over the reemployment of the laid-off workers. They also included finding jobs for the rest of the unemployed members and securing unemployment benefits.58 In the long run, the SPWA aimed to found unions of unemployed workers in other provinces and to establish a unified national union. During its lifetime, the SPWA won a number of concessions through negotiations with the Provisional Government, including reemployment of groups of workers and unemployment loans.59 A conflict arose between the SPWA and the authorities regarding the allocation of the unemployment loans. While the Ministry of Labor recognized the role of the SPWA in this process, the local clergy and the pasdaran dissented and insisted that the loans be distributed through the local mosques. The SPWA, however, did not relent. As a compromise, both sides agreed on schools instead of mosques as the place of loan disbursement.60 The role of the mobilizers Young activists (mainly students) with radical Islamic and socialist orientations played a major part in mobilizing and organizing the unemployed. Initially, activists often targeted recent high school graduates (diplomeha-ye bikaar), who were more suitable for mobilization purposes: the revolution had given students extensive experience in group efforts. The activists then linked the concerns of these young job-seekers to those of the general mass of unemployed. The social skills, literacy, and mobility of the high school graduates made them potential

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mobilizers in their own right. A socialist organizer described this tactic’s effectiveness in creating an unemployed organization in Kermanshah, a city in the east of Iran: We gathered the others [diplomehs] and asked them to express their views [on protest actions]. We concluded that each of us present should assume an area of responsibility. We should, for instance, inform our friends, relatives, neighbors, and classmates of such an action. We should also prepare flyers for distribution throughout the city.61 At first, the diplomehs in Kermanshah insisted on an exclusive organization of their own. Later, however, they became convinced that they shared a common cause with other jobless people.62 Thus their recruitment campaign began among the unemployed poor and the construction and casual laborers in working-class neighborhoods. In their first collective effort, they managed to bring 1,000 unemployed workers together. At this assembly, the speakers stressed the importance of setting up an association of the unemployed and uniting all jobless masses. Following a street march, the organizers convened a sit-in on the premises of the governorate. On this occasion the crowd appointed seven representatives, including four diplomehs (two men and two women), two unemployed laborers, and one representative from the parents of the diplomehs. A few days later, the representatives met in a public park with a group of fifty participants to decide on an official name for the organization and to propose by-laws for discussion and adoption. The Union of Unemployed People of Kermanshah was thus established.63 Although widespread, the organizational activities of the unemployed remained largely localized and isolated in different parts of the country. Most were so involved in the daily struggle for survival that they paid very little attention to the outside world. The vital tasks of recruitment, confrontations with the pasdaran, and sustenance of morale consumed much of their energies. The idea of founding a national coordinating association came by and large from left-wing activists.64 One crucial attempt was made to link these individual campaigns in a national framework. On April 23, 1979, delegates from over twenty cities and towns gathered in the House of Labor in Tehran. They aimed to unify their stands and strategies with a view to founding a nationwide organization of unemployed. Delegates also discussed the conditions of the jobless in different parts of the country, especially the ramifications of accepting the “unemployment loan.”65 The meeting, which lasted three days, was closed to reporters. A concluding statement instructed all unemployed masses in the country to stage demonstrations on May Day 1979 and to direct their demands toward the government. The resolution warned that if the authorities did not respond positively, the national organizers would “take harsher and more resolute measures to ensure that the Iranian working people achieved their just objectives.”66 Indeed, these organizational efforts were carried out with extraordinary speed. The Tehran Meeting on April 23 – the climax of the organizational activity – came 106

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only two months after the revolution. Setting up a structured association is often the final stage in a campaign. If mass action, spontaneous protests, and unstructured mobilization do not yield the desired results, a structured organization is required to ensure continuity. In Iran, the line between mass action and organizational work seemed blurred. First, people had just emerged from a successful revolution and were ready to be mobilized. Second, the mobilizers greatly valued associationbuilding and viewed this practice as a measure of success. The left adamantly insisted on organizational work, viewing institution-building as essential for creating a sustained working-class base for its own purposes. Mostly, however, these associations retained a loose structure, often serving only as ad hoc coordinating committees to mobilize the campaigns. They rarely used any elaborate organizational procedures, advocated electoral campaigns, or competed to appoint representatives. Despite these intensive efforts, lack of time prevented these organizations from evolving and confronting the test of efficacy. The unemployed movement was soon stopped in its tracks.

The demise The unemployed movement withered away as quickly as it had sprung to life. May Day marked the climax of the collective action of the workless. Afterward, interest gradually waned until the movement’s virtual demise by mid-autumn of 1979. In the summer of 1979, the war in Kurdistan undermined the campaign’s activities and the government used its repression of Kurdish nationalists as an opportunity to quell other dissent. Although a number of jobless protest marches took place, their scope remained limited. On October 1, a crowd of 1,500 workless, the second such march organized within a week, demonstrated outside the prime minister’s office. The pasdaran fired over their heads and the government threatened to deal with the protesters severely.67 In the dramatic ambience associated with the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, the concerns of the unemployed were lost amid the noisy campaign of “Islam against the Great Satan.” Indeed, on the very same day that the Muslim students climbed over the embassy walls, a large group of unemployed marched in the streets of the capital. The desperate appeals of these marchers were stifled by the nationalist outcry of the mass demonstrations that emerged from the embassy compound. Why did the movement disappear so rapidly? First, political pressure intensified. Pro-government paramilitary organizations stepped up psychological and physical attacks, raiding and ransacking the headquarters of the jobless. The movement’s leaders were branded as “infidel communists” or munafiqs (hypocrites), referring to the Mujahedin-i Khalq, a leftist Islamic group. Armed pasdaran members violently attacked almost any sit-in by the unemployed, especially when they were convinced that the radical left and the Mujahedin were scheming to undermine the revolution. Various attacks were reported in Tehran, Isfahan, Abadan, Ahwaz, Gachsaran, and Khorramabad, most within the two months following the victory of the revolution. In addition, employers formed “worker gangs” to harass laid-off 107

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workers who voiced their protests, especially those calling on the government to take over industry.68 Friday prayer leaders would often denounce the unemployed activists as agents of a counter-revolution, inciting the praying crowd – often from working-class backgrounds themselves – to attack and disrupt gatherings of the jobless. The Islamic leaders were able to mobilize the poor against the poor. Notwithstanding their differences, the various factions within the ruling elite all favored ending the unemployed protest. Radicals and conservatives, liberals and Islamists, all considered the activists impatient opportunists who aimed to harvest the fruits of the revolution before they were ripe.69 Second, an internal battle among the leaders, especially those with strong political convictions, further weakened the movement. Whereas Muslim activists and workers motivated by economic and social concerns tended to compromise to achieve immediate gains, radical leftist leaders, and workers adhering to a political ideology insisted on prolonging the campaign and incorporating it in the general struggle to undermine the Provisional Government.70 In addition, despite the efforts by the mobilizers to unite jobless graduates and unemployed laborers, the rift between the two persisted. While the left strove to publicize the plight of the jobless masses, it was particularly adamant that the movement be radicalized and politicized. Most leftist publications,71 especially those of the Maoist groups known as khatt-i sevvum (Third Road),72 carried diverse reports on the struggles of the unemployed. They analyzed the causes of lay-offs, while often relating them to the “crisis of capitalism” and offering recommendations for combating joblessness. The weekly Alaihe-i Bikaari (Against Unemployment) of the Razmandegan Organization was wellknown for raising these issues.73 A number of militant workers, such as Ali Adalatfam, Hassan Lur, Asad, and others – mainly with a Maoist outlook – led the campaign in Tehran; their counterparts mobilized job-seekers in the provincial cities.74 While the leftist activists were primarily motivated by their desire to help the poor, they nevertheless utilized the campaign for their own political ends: first, to undermine the “liberal bourgeois” Provisional Government and, second, to obtain popular support for their own organizations. In practice, this strategy meant sacrificing the movement’s interests to further the political strategy of the individual socialist groups. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the exceptional conjuncture and conditions (i.e. the sudden and massive loss of work during the revolution) that had given rise to the movement were gradually transformed. A number of factories resumed operations, reemploying some of their labor force. Within the first six months of the revolution, some 50 percent of industries and small plants were once again operational.75 The labor-intensive construction sector, which had previously employed some 1 million laborers, still needed to be revived. To this end, the Provisional Government extended Rls 12 billion in credit to contractors to enable them to pay back wages and to revitalize the sector as a whole.76 In the second half of the Iranian year 1358 (1979), construction slowly revived by 108

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building small and inexpensive housing units.77 By May 1979, some 21,000 jobs had been created in this sector.78 Occasionally, laid-off workers took over their workplaces, appointing a shura, or workers’ council, to run the operations. At times they requested that the government appoint professional managers to resume work.79 On May 6, 1979, for instance, ten workers from the Metusak factory attempted to regain their jobs by staging a sit-in at the factory. They continued to occupy the premises for twenty-five days, after which they issued a statement: “Twenty-five days sit-in including four days of a hunger strike! The result? [. . .] Nothing!” “What could we do?” they went on. “No choice remained but to take over the workshop, operating it by ourselves.” “So, on Sunday 9 Ordibehesht [May 1, 1979], we entered the workshop and, after repairing the machines and assigning responsibilities, we began to produce and sell the products.”80 Similarly, laid-off workers in Plastou Masourehkar reopened their plant and went back to work.81 While these tactics were effective ways of regaining jobs in some cases, they were not universally successful. Former employees of un-Islamic operations, such as cabarets, night clubs and the lottery business, for example, stood no chance of reemployment. Under intense pressure from the movement, the Ministry of Labor attempted to create some temporary jobs, including public works such as road construction and planting trees in public places. Although Bazargan’s government officially banned any further state-sector employment, a number of new revolutionary institutions (nahadha-ye inqilabi), such as pasdaran Komitehs (Revolutionary Guards), Jihad-i Sazandegui (Construction Crusade), Nihzat-i Savad Aamuzi (Movement for Literacy), and Bonyad-i Maskan (Housing Foundation) nevertheless absorbed a considerable share of the jobless population. For instance, the Construction Crusade, which was established in June 1979, maintained 327 centers throughout the country and employed 14,800 paid workers and 4,700 volunteers in 1979.82 A small percentage of the 200,000 lottery ticket sellers were hired by the local pasdaran Komitehs to sell cigarettes in the streets as a measure against hoarding.83 In December 1979, a job-creation project was ratified for high school graduates that provided for production cooperatives throughout the country.84 In the end, the unemployment loan offered by the government, however meager, proved a temporary solution for some poor unemployed. The offer undoubtedly divided the ranks of the jobless. By July 6, 1979, within three months of its institution, about 182,000 unemployed workers had received an average monthly loan of Rls 9,500.85 By the end of the summer of 1979, after six months of operation, however, the entire scheme was discontinued on the grounds that “industrial investment has started, and workers are gradually returning to their jobs.”86 As for the unemployed diplomehs, the government planned to extend an “honorary loan” (vaam-i sharafati) from a fund comprising 1 percent of the monthly salaries of any citizens wishing to contribute. The contributions were to be repaid by the state in five years’ time.87 In the meantime, institutions of family, kinship, and traditional networks continued to protect the jobless. Young unemployed depended on their 109

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immediate families, while older ones counted on friends and relatives to secure some type of work, loan, and assistance. In the end, the traditional method of relying on informal networks as opposed to politically oriented associations, combined with the force of political pressure and economic change, led to the movement’s demise. Traditional institutions made the unemployed less desperate; economic changes eroded the movement’s constituency; and political repression deprived it of its leadership. The beginning of the war in Kurdistan inflicted a heavy blow on the vulnerable movement, while the wave of euphoria following the US Embassy seizure drowned out its presence.

Conclusion Despite organizational weaknesses, the movement of the jobless in Iran made some important inroads. It forced the provisional government to grant loans and aid to over 180,000 unemployed workers for six months and to create a number of temporary jobs. In some provinces, the campaigns of the unemployed forced the authorities to reopen factories that had shut down. Eventually, groups of laid-off workers began reopening their workplaces without the consent of their employers. Most importantly, the movement prompted the Provisional Government to rush economic recovery, especially in the crippled industries where the most jobs had been lost. These achievements undermined the movement itself. The laid-off factory workers who led the organizations and campaigns of the unemployed began to return to work. Others either found jobs, resumed their old occupations or sought alternative means of survival. In short, the decline of the unemployed movement was primarily attributable to its limited success. However, many of the people without work remained jobless, especially as new groups of job-seekers entered the labor market. The concessions neither reduced unemployment significantly nor relieved the plight of many of the jobless. The movement failed to win the unemployment benefits it had originally demanded and accepted an unemployment loan instead. The loan, which the government never truly expected to be repaid, covered only about 10 percent of the unemployed and was discontinued after six months.88 Job creation schemes remained limited. Not only did thousands of the remaining jobless fail to find work, but a new wave of rural–urban migration inflated the size of the jobless population even further in the years that followed. In short, the exceptional circumstances (massive and sudden unemployment and an ideological element) facilitating the formation of the unemployed movement changed while unemployment persisted. The jobless needed to adjust their activities to the new political and economic reality. The Islamic regime stabilized and seized control of popular struggles. The critical masses of unemployed (i.e. the laid-off factory workers) largely regained their jobs and exited the movement. For the remaining jobless, activities in the informal sector, petty trade, and street vending served as the most common recourse.

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While involved in their movement, many jobless revolutionaries continuously searched for alternative sources of personal income. There were probably many like Ahmad Mirzaii, a diplomeh, who described his position as “owing to unemployment, I take care of the electrical problems of my neighbors and receive payment; sometimes, I drive my brother’s taxi.”89 Some were convinced that they could secure work only through concerted efforts. Ali Golestani, a diplomeh who was on the job market for six months, believed that “a bit of resourcefulness will provide thousands of opportunities; people can sell fruits in the streets, peddle wares, work as salespersons, or do part-time or casual work.”90 Indeed, thousands of the jobless resorted to street subsistence work, occupying spots on the sidewalks, public parks, and busy thoroughfares of the big cities to set up kiosks and stands. While the jobless were previously the main agents of the street politics, street subsistence workers – such as the street vendors – now assumed that role.91 Beyond the immediate concern for day-to-day survival, the unemployed movement achieved a broader political impact. As a form of early popular radicalism, the movement challenged the revolutionary regime’s legitimacy. It demonstrated that contrary to the prevailing assumptions, the new revolutionary regime lacked established hegemony over the popular classes. It faced dissent from many of those in whose name the Islamic revolution and the new state were legitimized: the mustaz’afin (the downtrodden). Some attribute such popular protests to the political manipulations of the radical left. While leftist groups admittedly influenced much of the postrevolutionary popular opposition including the movement of the jobless, the jobless poor were not merely a tool in the hands of socialists. The unemployed poor, once they became aware of their position as a critical constituency, learned to use the left as well as the government to further their own interests. They were driven more by pragmatism than by ideological (Islamic or socialist) inclinations. The unemployed took advantage of the intense competition between the leftist opposition and the Islamic government over mobilizing and leading the mass movements. In this way, the poor and the workless revolutionaries both benefitted from and contributed to the radicalization, or populism, of the ruling clergy.

Notes 1 This background section on the Iranian Revolution is based upon Asef Bayat, “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution: Comparing Islamist Activism in Iran and Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1998), 40, No. 1, January 1998, pp. 136–69. For a historical background to the Iranian revolution see Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ, 1982); and Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (London, 1982). For literature on the Islamic revolution reflecting different perspectives, see Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions; Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown (Oxford, 1988); Mansoor Moaddel, Class, State and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York, 1993); Mohsen Milani, The Making of the Islamic Revolution in Iran

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2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

(Boulder, CO, 1988). The best account may be found in Misagh Parsa, The Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989). On the anti-democratic nature of the Shah’s regime and its political implications see Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (London, 1977) (on SAVAK activities); Habib Lajevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse, NJ, 1985). On guerrilla activities in Iran see Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development; Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions. Useful accounts of postrevolutionary events may be found in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1984); and Ali Rahnema and Farhad Nomani, The Secular Miracle: Religion, Politics and Economic Policy in Iran (London, 1990). Bank Markazi Iran, Annual Economic Report, 1358 (Tehran, 1979), p. 7. See Paykar, 13, Mordad 1, 1358/1979, p. 6. Estimate from the Budget and Plan Organization based on the generalization of a survey of unemployed in Tehran in 1979; see Statistical Yearbook 1358 (Tehran, 1979), p. 102, Table 30. On Farvardin 24, 1358/1979, The Tehran Musavvar, a Tehran weekly, reported that “according to an official figure, three million workers are unemployed; most are casual and construction laborers;” see Tehran Musavvar, 1, No. 12, Farvardin 1358/1979, p. 12. The Council of Unemployed Diplomehs submitted a similar figure; see Pirouzi, 3, Azar 1359/1980, p. 31. In 1976, there were some 900,000 unemployed (10.2 percent of the labor force). Assuming that their number had reached 1 million by the advent of the revolution, some 2 million lost their jobs as a result of the revolutionary events. See Farjadi, “Barrasi-ye Bazaar-i Kar, Ishtighal va Bikaari dar Iran” [A Survey of Labor Market, Employment and Unemployment in Iran], Barnameh va Tawse‘eh, 2, No. 3 (Fall 1992), p. 69. By 1980, however, we know that fewer than 500,000 jobless had actually registered with the Ministry of Labor. On this subject and on an early discussion of the composition of the unemployed in postrevolutionary Iran, see “Jang, Kar va Bikari” [The War, Work, and Unemployment], Pirouzi, 3 (Azar 1359/1980), pp. 30–5. See Plan and Budget Organization, Barrasi-ye Bikaari dar Tehran, Tabistan 1358 [An Overview of Unemployment in Tehran: Summer 1979] (Tehran, 1979). See Asef Bayat, “Why Don’t the Unemployed Rebel? Or Do They?” mimeograph (The American University in Cairo, 1996). Interviews with Mustafa, an unemployed workers’ organizer in the oil city of Abadan, conducted in Los Angeles, May 1986; also see Organization of People’s Guerrilla Fedaian of Iran (OPGFI), Gozarishi az Tashkil-i Sandika-ye Kargaran-i Prozheii (Fasli) Abadan [A Report on the Formation of the Seasonal Workers’ Union in Abadan] (Tehran, 1979). See Ayandegan, Farvardin 25, 1357/1978. See OPGFI, Gozareshi az Mubarizat-i Kargaran-i Bikaar-Shudeh. Ibid. One tuman equals Rls 10. In 1979, US$1 ⫽ about Rls 70. See Paygham-i 1mrouz, Farvardin 11, 1358/1979. Ibid. See, for example, Kargar beh Pish, the journal of the Paykar Organization, No. 5, Khordad 8, 1358/1979, p. 4. See Mehdi Bazargan, Masa’el va Mushkilat-i Sal-i Avval-i Inqilab [The Problems and Difficulties of the First Year of the Revolution] (Tehran, 1983). OPGFI, Gozareshi az Karagaran-i Bikaar-Shudeh, p. 30. See Tehran Musavvar, “Bar Bikaaran-i Mutahassen dar Nowrooz Che Gozasht?” [What Happened to the Unemployed in Sit-In in Nowrooz?], Farvardin 10, 1358/1979. See also Ayandegan, Farvardin 9, 1358/1979, p. 3; also interviews with Naser (who participated in the operations), December 1994, Germany.

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21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

A copy of the flyer is in the author’s possession. See Ayandegan, Esfand 29, 1357/1979. Ibid. See Tehran Musavvar, 10, Farvardin 10, 1358/1979, p. 19. Based upon an interview with Naser (a leading participant in the hunger strike), December 1994. This sense of disappointment and expectation can be detected in the following angry statement from a laid-off worker: “We have now been out of work for the last seven months. Is this really the result of our Revolution – that we get left out in the cold and are penniless and unemployed? At the beginning of the revolution, during our strikes, the managers would threaten us by calling the police. Now, they do the same thing, by calling the pasdaran!” See Ayandegan, Khordad 13, 1358/1979, p. 4. Ayandegan, Esfand 29, 1357/1978. See Tehran Musavvar, 10, Farvardin 10, 1358/1979, p. 20. Interview with Naser (who participated in the hunger strike), December 1994. OPFGI, Gozareshi az Mubarizat-i Kargaran-i Bikaar-Shudeh [A Report on the Struggles of the Laid-off Workers] (Tehran, 1979). Also based on my interviews with Ghasem, an exiled worker who was active among the unemployed workers of the city of Abadan, and Mehrdad, a left-wing mobilizer. See Ayandegan, Khordad 9, 1358/1979. See ibid., Farvardin 15, 1358/1979, p. 3. See ibid., Farvardin 27, 1358/1979, p. 3. Kargar Beh Pish, Khordad 5, 8, 1358/1979, p. 7. See Kar, 5 Farvardin 1358/1979. See ibid., 7 Farvardin 30, 1358/1979. See ibid., 6 Farvardin 1358/1979. A copy of the resolution is in the author’s possession. See Kar, 9 Ordibehesht 13, 1359/1980, p. 8. See ibid., 7 Farvardin 30, 1358/1979, p. 5. Ibid. The leaflet of the Fedaii Organization, dated 21 Esfand 1357/1978), is in the author’s possession. Kar, 9 Ordibehesht 13, 1358/1979. Interview with Reza, who organized the unemployed in the city of Kermanshah (Bakhtaran), conducted on February 10, 1993. Ibid. See the statements made by those organizations on May Day 1358/1979. See also Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism (Berkeley, CA, 1993), the chapter on “May Day in the Islamic Republic.” For a detailed report on May Day 1979 see Farhang-i Novin, 4, Ordibehesht 1358/1979, special May Day issue. See Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran (London, 1987), p. 104, Table 7.1. See Abbas Khalesi, Tarikhcheh-ye Bast va Bastnishini [A Short History of Bastnishini] (Tehran, 1987). Khalesi, in Tarikhche-ye Bast, sees a continuity, from ancient to contemporary times, in the usage of the concept bast-nishini (pp. 59–70). In addition, the term tahassun is described in the major encyclopedias of both Dehkhoda and Mo’in as a synonym for bastnishastan. While some elements of traditional ideology (such as recourse to the Royal Court, or tahassun at the Ministry of Justice), persist, the term’s meanings have largely changed over time. Traditionally, tahassun meant the efforts by individuals or groups to seek refuge at a holy site as a means of escaping punishment or voicing a protest. It was a mechanism of justice in the absence of laws by means of resorting to divine protection. The concept changed slightly at the beginning of modern times. In Iran, since the Qajar dynasty (1797–1921), the places of refuge included not only the

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

holy sites but also the royal courts, stables of aristocrats, public telegraph offices, and especially foreign embassies (Ibid., pp. 19–20). During this period, concepts evolved such as political asylum, diplomatic immunity, and the like. In this altered sense, the actors resort not so much to divine protection as to political authority. Finally, the term’s contemporary connotations are entirely different. Today, it is understood essentially as a collective action by a group of people who either pursue publicity for a particular belief or cause disruption to pressure the authorities to satisfy certain demands. The concept is almost mixed with the modem practice of “temporary occupation,” where the actors resort neither to God nor to political authority but rather to public pressure. See Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, 1979). Interview with Mehrdad, a left-wing activist involved in the unemployed movement, July 1993. Interview, conducted in October 1993, with Roham, a reporter on labor issues for the Tehran daily, Paygham-i lmrouz. The newspaper was published after the revolution of 1979 but banned in the summer of that year. Interview with Roham, October 1993. Interview with Naser, a worker activist in the House of Labor, December 1994. OPGFI, Gozareshi az Tashkil-i Sandika-ye Kargaran-i Bikaar-Shudeh. See Kargar Beh Pish, 5, 1358/1979, p. 11. Interviews with Mustafa (one of the leaders of the SPWA) conducted in Los Angeles, May 1985. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Interview with Reza, a labor activist, May 1993. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ayandegan, Ordibehesht 4, 1358/1979, p. 3; see also Tehran Musavvar, “Gozareshi az Khane-ye Kargar va Sokhanan-i Kargaran-i Bikaar,” 2, Khordad 18, 1358/1979, pp. 24–5. The Resolution of the Central Constituent Council of the Unions of the Unemployed Project and Laid-off Workers of Iran. The original text is in the author’s possession. See Middle East Economic Digest, October 5, 1979, p. 2. Interview with Roham, a labor reporter, October 1993. The statements by many officials immediately after the revolution substantiate this argument. Interview with leftist activists involved in the movement confirm this point. Such as Kar, Paykar, Khahar-i Kargar, Khahar Nameh, Kargar-i Komonist, Mujahed. The Tudeh (Communist Party) was considered the “first road” and the various Marxist guerrilla Fedaii organizations the “second road.” A Marxist-Leninist organization with a Maoist orientation. Interview with Darvishpour (who participated in unemployed workers campaigns), conducted in November 1993. See Bazargan, Masa’el va Mushkilat-i Inqilab, p. 122. Ibid. See Bank Markazi Iran, Annual Economic Report (Tehran, 1982), p. 8. This information was released by the Labor Ministry in Ayandegan, Ordibehesht 2, 1358/ 1979, p. 1. In addition, the Ministry of Roads and Supply announced that it employed some 5,000 skilled and unskilled laborers for road construction; see Ayandegan, Khordad 16, 1358/1979, p. 4.

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79 For the details, see Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran. 80 An original copy of the flyer issued after the workers began their sit-in is in the author’s possession; see also Kar, 9, Ordibehesht 13, 1358/1979, p. 10. 81 See Ayandegan, Mordad 27, 1358/1979, p. 5. 82 See Bank Markazi Iran, Annual Economic Report, 1982, p. 50. 83 See Ayandegan, Farvardin 21, 1358/1979. 84 See Ettilaat, Shahrivar 2, 1364/1985. 85 Ayandegan, Tir 17, 1358/1979. 86 Ibid. 87 See Bazergan, Masa’el va Mushkilat-i Inqilab, p. 125. 88 Ayandegan, Khordad 9, 1358/1979. 89 Ibid., Khordad 22, 1358/1979. 90 Ibid. 91 For a discussion of these issues and events, see Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York, 1998).

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5 TRANSFORMING THE CITY FROM BELOW Shantytown dwellers and the fight for electricity in Casablanca Lamia Zaki

The continuous rural exodus which Morocco has experienced for more than fifty years has transformed the country from a rural to an urban one: in 1950 city-dwellers represented less than 25 per cent of the whole population, while by the year 2000 the level of urbanization reached nearly 57 per cent. The rapid urbanization of the country reinforced a phenomenon that had first appeared in the 1920s: the development of shantytowns. These shantytowns constitute an important Moroccan social reality, as they house more than 8 per cent of the urban population. First relegated to the outside of the urban perimeter, these illegal settlements were later incorporated within the growing cities, new settlements constantly appearing on the expanding urban edges. If public policy towards the shantytowns evolved through time, a constant can be found: namely, the ambiguity which characterizes the institutional attitude (made up of both tolerance and prohibition) towards these areas. The very existence of the shantytowns, which stand as a direct violation of property rights and urban rules, is considered as a symbol of deviance inside the official urban structure. Shantytowns can be tolerated as temporary and transitory forms of settlement in order to preserve the social peace, but they must, paradoxically, retain the attributes of uncertainty in order to be accepted by the authorities and to remain. If their inhabitants are to be allowed to stay, these illegitimate spaces must show through material and symbolic signs that they do not belong to the ‘real’, to the legitimate town. This is why the questions of space planning and infrastructures are of such importance. They are viewed as highly political, and give rise to constant bargaining between the inhabitants, their elected representatives and the representatives of the State at the local level. We will focus here on a specific aspect of this bargaining process, that of the struggle of the shantytown dwellers (karianis)1 for electricity. The electrification of the shantytowns was initiated in Casablanca after the State-controlled company 116

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in charge of the town electric management was replaced by a private enterprise called Lydec in 1997.2 The shantytowns’ electrification started with the setting-up of a pilot site at Ben M’sik3 in 1998, in the context of a project funded by USAID. We shall not discuss here that first experiment as such, but rather the circumstances that allowed the effective generalization of the project over the whole built-up area. Indeed, the shantytowns’ integration to the town electric network did not go smoothly, as the legal connection of the shantytown dwellers was considered by the authorities to constitute a form of recognition of their settlement. It seems that in 1999 the governor of Greater Casablanca gave an agreement in principle for the electrification of the Casablanca shantytowns, provided that the final authorizations for connection were granted by the prefectures on a case-bycase basis, depending on the arguments of the elected representatives and the population, but also on the characteristics of each shantytown. According to Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin,4 the privatization of systems of infrastructure promotes their ‘unbundling’ and thus leads, if not always, at least most of the time, to the fragmentation (the ‘splintering’) of the social fabric in metropolitan areas. We intend throughout this case study to question the theory of ‘splintering urbanism’. Contrary to this thesis, the search for profitability is not always to the poor’s disadvantage.5 Indeed in Casablanca, the concession of public services to a private enterprise did not lead to the shantytown dwellers’ exclusion, but rather to their integration into the electric network from which they had always been excluded. The paradigm of ‘the modern infrastructural ideal’ developed by Graham and Marvin,6 referring to a golden period of integrated and unified public networks, has never applied to Morocco (nor to Africa in general).7 It thus cannot be considered as a starting point for assessing the contemporary condition of the infrastructure networks, which have in reality always been heterogenous and fragmented.

Legitimization rhetoric and conflicting contexts of interpretation The State between acceptance of electricity piracy and resistance to formal electrification By definition, the shantytown develops in opposition to the law of the land and to the regular urban fabric. Its inhabitants challenge the State authority on a day-to-day basis because of their illegal and irregular settlement. Their presence is tolerated by the public powers as long as it appears as a transitory and temporary phenomenon. In order to ensure its hold on this informal territory, the State uses a form of administration which we may describe as ‘management by absence’. The objective of this strategy is to fix the shantytown dweller in an infra-legal situation, a ‘pseudo-clandestineness’,8 never formally recognizing his (her) rights as a citydweller (there is no legal text formalizing the shantytown’s public management), even though his (her) civic rights are recognized:9 urban and political integration 117

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are here disjoined. By maintaining the inhabitants on the legal margin, the State creates a latent insecurity which sustains the shantytown dwellers’ fragility and limits the assertion of collective demands. The concern of the public authorities to avoid actions likely to be interpreted as a formal recognition of the shantytowns did not always prevent them from closing their eyes to practices enabling the inhabitants to enjoy certain minimum conditions of comfort and hygiene. Public authorities thus operate a constant shift between prohibition and indulgence. The building of brick shacks or the installation of sewage disposal networks are part of these tolerated practices, but their acceptance is not automatic. It depends on the inhabitants’ ability to use some essential resources, such as political capital in the form of the intervention of the local elected representatives. As shown by Nadia Khouri-Dagher in the Egyptian case, in a context where the State is disengaged from the economy, the public authorities can knowingly make concessions to the oppressed by granting them a small amount of power in return for social peace. ‘[B]y favouring ‘muddling through’, namely solutions at individual level, the State limits . . . citizens’ attempts to find solutions at community level, which could end up calling its power into question’.10 Therefore, the ‘tricks of the weak’ used by individuals do not always deceive the authorities.11 Illegal practices (including the piracy of electricity) do not always happen entirely without the State’s knowledge. But the latter tolerates these tricks provided that they remain at the level of isolated individual action and do not take on a collective dimension. In the Moroccan context, the State has been tacitly tolerating electricity fraud in certain Casablanca shantytowns, particularly since the early 1990s. This electricity piracy was accepted partly to preserve social peace, but also to keep the shantytown dwellers out of the town proper. It also allowed the State to preserve an important means of pressure on the populations. However, the authorities were reluctant to agree to the launch of a pilot electrification site at Ben M’sik. The eventual spread of the principle to all the shantytowns in Casablanca was even more reluctantly conceded, and took place under the combined pressure of Lydec and the shantytown dwellers. Certain formulae used by the governors of the various prefectures of Casablanca show this clearly. In a letter dated 2 April 1998 (before the launch of the first shantytown electrification) the governor of the prefecture of Sidi Bernoussi Zenata, the representative of the central authority, wrote to the local Lydec manager as follows: ‘I would like to remind you that the dwellings in the camps and shantytowns are in contravention of the town-planning and building regulations; electrification would undoubtedly encourage them to grow and proliferate.’ He asked the company to reject private applications for connecting the shantytowns to the electricity grid. The symbolic and material consequences of electrification were clear to the public authorities: by generating a clear improvement in the quality of life, the process of electrification reduced the inhabitants’ incentive to leave the shantytown. A year later the same official, in a letter dated 28 June 1999, accepted that technical feasibility studies should be carried out for the provisional supply of 118

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electricity to the shantytowns. Even when the authorities accepted the principle of the electrification of the shantytowns, they were concerned to ‘point out’ that for the public authorities it was ‘not an end in itself, but simply an operation to improve the living standards of this category of the population while awaiting the implementation of a rehousing programme’ (letter from the governor of Anfa to Lydec’s Chief Executive dated 13 November 2001). The State was prepared to tolerate electrification provided that it was conceived and presented by Lydec as a temporary short-term operation. The authorities were concerned to ensure that connection did not – with the passage of time – take on the seal of a legitimate connection, and to stress that the legality that accompanied the electrification process was a second-rate legality. Electrification could not in principle be permitted in shantytowns involved in a rehousing or relocation project. This ban, however, proved to be difficult for the authorities to justify when certain projects were planned but had been held up for several years or even decades. This was the case for Carrières Centrales, where projects had been successively carried out since right after Independence although without much effect on the numbers of people living in this shantytown. Even though a new project of the kind had recently been launched, we shall see how the mobilization by the inhabitants finally resulted in a legal connection to the city’s electricity grid. The authorities thus manage order in the kariens by maintaining those spaces physically and symbolically out of town, while tolerating certain forms of urban integration.12 This strategy for preserving social peace in shantytowns by keeping the inhabitants on the fringes of the law, alternatively playing the cards of permissiveness and prohibition, is comparable to the State’s authoritarian strategies of regulation and cooptation of the elites.13 Lydec: market forces and the right to profit The rhetoric Lydec used to convince the State of the need to connect the shantytowns to the electricity grid centered around three main themes. First, it stressed the dysfunction caused by illegal connections. Second, it highlighted the danger of piracy, not only for shantytown dwellers but also for Lydec agents. Third, it underlined the importance of the financial losses registered by the company. Besides causing power cuts, piracy can also provoke wide variations in current that often damage the electrical equipment of regular Lydec consumers. The customers sent numerous letters of protest to the firm, who systematically forwarded them to the governors. By doing so, Lydec attempted not only to communicate its clients’ discontent to the public authorities, but also to make the latter feel responsible for finding a solution, as it was their duty to ensure respect for private property.14 Lydec also underscored the danger of piracy, especially when bare wires were used to divert the electricity. On the old type of connection boards, with four bare copper wires, it was possible to obtain a 220 volt supply by attaching two clamps 119

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to two of these four wires, which in those days were easily identifiable because they were always fitted in the same order. The early forms of theft thus consisted of clamping two wires, which were then stretched over to the shack; there was a grave danger of the wires contacting the metal cladding of the shack and causing accidents. However, it is impossible to get even an estimate of the number of victims: Lydec itself is not officially informed if anyone dies of electrocution in a shantytown. One can simply assume that there were many accidents, as the accounts of the karianis seem to confirm: tales of women being electrocuted while using water for household chores, children being electrocuted by a piece of metal cladding coming into contact with a bare wire, pirates being killed while trying to connect or reconnect the supply, and so on. Since the mid-1990s, the boards fitted with four bare copper wires have gradually been replaced by a public electricity supply over twisted wires protected by a rubber sheathing. The wires are less easy to identify (they are marked by the company, but not all shantytown dwellers are able to decipher the coding), and have to be spliced to make a connection. The work is more dangerous, as the fraudsters are now directly in contact with the wires. According to reports by Lydec staff, the updating of piracy techniques prompted by the company’s new methods may have paradoxically reduced the risk of accidents: electricity theft has now become a business for the initiated that is carried out in a more organized and more rational way. Besides the technical risks linked to the dismantling and repair work made necessary by piracy, the employees of the private company also had to face the shantytown dwellers’ violent reactions. For instance, in May 1998, five attacks were recorded in the prefecture of Sidi Bernoussi Zenata (with knives, insults, threats, damage to a vehicle, and throwing of stones) while officials were making repairs in the districts bordering on three shantytowns following incidents provoked by illegal connections (letter of 1 June 1998 to the governor). Before the concession to Lydec, the public utility company minimized the scale of piracy by presenting the shantytowns’ electricity consumption as insignificant. Electricity theft in itself was regarded as a marginal phenomenon in shantytowns. According to the statements collected, the prevailing impression was that theft was a kind of ‘folklore’ practised by a few harmless pilferers, or at least assumed not to be any real nuisance. Lydec very quickly tried to assess the losses caused by electricity piracy. The loss estimates were much more important than expected, reaching around 12 million dirhams (1.2 million euros) in 1998 in Casablanca, according to the activity report of the company’s ‘less-favoured districts’ section for the period September 1998–September 1999. The work carried out in 1998 to repair the malfunctions caused by piracy was estimated at nearly 1.2 million dirhams. One Lydec manager estimated that the company’s losses amounted to 20 million dirhams in 2003, counting the cost of repairs and the loss of earnings associated with the regular customers’ consumption being interrupted during power cuts.

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It was a shock to discover the extent of the losses. As one official interviewed explained: We thought they were poor, in poverty; we never thought that they had not only radios, but also televisions, fridges, and there were even some with washing machines; some had freezers, irons and many other things. The fact that at Carrières Centrales the electrification of the shantytown required 5 transformer substations to be installed to supply the 4,500 households15 shows that the previously available infrastructure was totally inadequate for supplying the shantytown dwellers (as well as the district’s regular customers) and that their electricity consumption was far from marginal. The shantytown dwellers’ discourse on rights We shall see how the use of a discourse on rights borrowed from the political arena – whose linguistic resources had been reorganized by the imposition from above of a process of political liberalization – made a substantial contribution to transforming the shantytown dwellers’ perceptions regarding the issue of electricity, and encouraged them to take a radical stance in relation to Lydec’s action to cut them off. The existence of a common corpus of requirements and claims helped to crystallize the mobilization,16 which evolved from basic piracy techniques to more complex and sophisticated (sometimes overtly violent) forms of electricity fraud as a response to Lydec’s policy of piracy repression. The rationalization of piracy through language is an essential dimension of the mobilization for electricity. By sharing the same ‘injustice frame’, the shantytown dwellers actually legitimize the illegal connections while at the same time discrediting the system of authority. As these accounts show, by abandoning one definition of the situation and adopting a new one, they find justification for non-conformist, unauthorized acts.17 Motives for supporting and taking part in the piracy are expressed in uniform frames overall, linked on the one hand to the material progress that makes electrification possible and on the other to the symbolic dimension of the struggle for light. Before, we were treated like animals, like dogs, if you’ll pardon the expression (hachâk), we weren’t considered human. We walked in the mud, we ate out of the dustbins and we lived in the dark ( f-ddlâm). So? Are we not human? Are we not citizens too? What about human rights? Now, we’ve at least learnt a thing or two (ouâ‘în), and if we aren’t given our rights we’ll take them. Everyone has the right to light. They’ve even got light bulbs in the countryside ( f-l-‘roubiya). (Zahra, p. 38, El Qabla)

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We didn’t have light before because we didn’t know how, we didn’t dare. But people have developed (t-tawwroû), they’ve educated themselves. They have claimed their rights, they’ve fought for them and taken them. (Miloud, p. 60, El Qabla) These accounts clearly show that one of the functions of the mobilization for electricity, especially at the beginning, was to provide an alternative frame to what previously seemed to be the result of bad luck or fate, by transforming it into social injustice or moral transgression that called for action. It is thus striking in the extracts from the transcribed interviews how the level of awareness plays such a crucial role in the establishment of piracy. Awareness of the unbearable nature of a condition, of its unique dimension; awareness also that that condition could be remedied and that there was a common interest in acting together. While they previously seemed to accept it as natural, the shantydwellers appear to have gradually thrown off the stigma imposed upon them. The interviewees also made increasing use of animal imagery, coming to reject it violently and to refuse to associate with it: they cast off their marginality18 and rejected the ‘lower human value’ to which the electricity ban reduced them.19 The stigma was even turned against other groups (country dwellers, for example), who deserved electrification less than the shantytown dwellers. Shantytown dwellers were able to adopt these interpretations all the more effectively because they ‘resonated’ with the dominant belief systems of the time.20 The karianis were mobilizing legitimization repertoires that were embedded in the political context. Indeed, with the development since the late 1980s and early 1990s of discourses of openness, democratic transition and respect for human rights, the interviewees were able to make use of a lexicon that pervaded the political field to legitimize their claims. This is not the place to discuss whether or not there has in fact been a ‘transition’ in Morocco, to assess its aspects or limits, nor to analyse developments in the national political field over the past fifteen years. We aim to show only that the issue of rights (houqoûq) widely disseminated in the national political field was picked up by the shantytown dwellers: the right to electricity was likened to a human right, and any initiative designed to ensure respect for or dignity of the shantytown dwellers, or to allow them to assert a form of equality with the other city dwellers, became a human right. By appropriating a lexical field that was a vector of political credibility, the shantytown dwellers demonstrated their capacity to use the (scant) resources placed at their disposal. They were quick to demonstrate how well they understood the dominant system, their capacity to discern its faults and to exploit its potential weaknesses, and their aptitude to decipher what could be profitable to them within that system: We’re told that Morocco is the country of human rights. But for us, there is no equality, no respect or dignity. And yet I am a citizen just like the owners of villas and big cars. I’m a Moroccan too, and I take 122

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my rights: I have a right to electricity, and I take it, because I’m a human being (bachar), and not an animal. (Hassan, p. 60) Electricity fraud was not therefore perceived as the negation of the existing order: on the contrary, the shantytown dwellers did not set themselves up in opposition to the system of power. If they resisted, it was to enforce its essential principles. They saw themselves as ‘dissidents’ because their aim was to see principles triumph over the rules.21 To give more weight to their arguments and to obtain the authorities’ seal of approval for the shantytown’s practices, the interviewees made reference to royal speeches or more generally mentioned words attributed to the sovereign. For instance, the speech given by Mohamed VI on 21 August 2001 on the anniversary of ‘the Revolution of the King and the People’ had an important impact on the shantytown, in that the interviewees often quoted it to justify the inhabitants’ initiatives when these were opposed by the local authorities (the shantytown dwellers referred to it as ‘the speech on the shantytowns’ or by using expressions such as ‘when the king talked about the shantytowns’). When commenting on the king’s speech, and interpreting it, reconstructing its meaning, the karianis showed that they not only knew the speech but could also appreciate, explain (and potentially criticize) its content. While the speech aimed essentially to make accountable the bodies responsible for combating insalubrious housing, and to announce a national project to ‘eradicate’ non-compliant and anarchic building, the shantytown dwellers saw it as an encouragement to improve living conditions in the shantytowns: the ‘perceived reality’ was fashioned collectively; less by persuasion on the part of the leader than by communal self-persuasion, all the more important in that it was a key element governing participation in action:22 We do what sidna would want for us. He wants us to live, he wants what is good for us, because he knows that we are citizens (mouwâtinîn), and that as citizens we have rights like everyone else. He said so in his speech on the kariens, you know. If the Government did what sidna wants, we’d all be living in dignity and tranquillity, with water, electricity and real houses. But the moqaddmîn and the big-shots and the police, and all the makhzen in general, they don’t try to understand. So we’re obliged to take what is our due. Our king is the king of the poor. He loves and understands us; and he wants to help us. That’s how we managed to get electricity. The shantytown dwellers demonstrated an ability to produce integrated arguments, embellishing their personal experience of problems with elements of understanding drawn not only from media-speak, but also directly from the highest level of political discourse that they appropriated for their own purposes (reading it in a way that was favourable to them, that is excluding the concept of servility).23 123

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Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi and Olivier Fillieule note that ‘the dissolution of fear, the integration through official discourse of international human rights references, and the recognition of the legitimacy of a number of claims have helped to increase the number of “pacified” organized movements prepared to act “within the system”.’24 In the shantytowns, it seems that this emancipation of speech has also enabled action ‘outside the system’ to become tougher, alongside the development of more conventional forms of mobilization (sit-ins, petitions, etc.). Electricity theft was characterized not only by its being illegal, but also by a form of (sometimes violent) resistance to the imposed order. Deviance was assumed to be necessary and effective for conserving and even expanding a legitimate gain: access to electricity. But it was only with the introduction of the private operator that piracy took on hitherto unknown proportions, and took a radical turn. ‘Lydec’s arrival changed people’s behaviour. While it was unthinkable to oppose the public utility company officials [before the arrival of Lydec in 1997], a considerable increase was reported in verbal or even physical violence against Lydec staff during their field work. This even reached the point where it was no longer possible to operate in certain districts’ (Lydec activity report 1998–1999, ‘less-favoured districts’ section). The battle was directed against the private company and its staff, who were maintaining an intolerable ‘liberal bourgeois system’ (as an interviewee reported) and preventing a fair redistribution of wealth and opportunity within Moroccan society. While in the end it was the government policy of limiting communal facilities in shantytowns that was called into question, the uprising against Lydec (at least in the first stage) enabled the mobilization to be depoliticized, or rather its meaning to be redefined and displaced in order to attenuate the offensive nature of ‘electricity dissidence’ in relation to the State. The insubordination appeared less subversive and became more effective. Electricity theft was aimed at the State; the challenge was to the State; but the private operator played the part of screen actor and made possible the rise of the mobilization.

The radicalization of piracy: theft as an effective means of achieving integration into the electricity grid Disconnection campaigns . . . To combat electricity piracy, Lydec set up ‘disconnection campaigns’ consisting of dismantling illegal installations by shantytown dwellers and making them inoperative, at least temporarily. The ‘electricity disconnection and anti-fraud campaigns’ became widespread in 200125 and were organized in cooperation with the authorities: the operations took place in the presence of members of the police and auxiliary forces. Their participation in these operations implemented by the private operator had a clear practical and functional scope: it enabled the inhabitants’ discontent to be channelled, and to prevent the worst full-on resistance; but it also 124

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had an important symbolic meaning, in that it showed how the State was cooperating and involved in the fight against electricity theft. In the beginning, the Lydec staff simply disconnected the wires installed by the shantytown dwellers. Since the inhabitants systematically and immediately reconnected them, the company was forced to adopt more radical methods: the cables were not only disconnected, but also cut into short lengths to make them completely unusable. Aware that twisted cables were particularly expensive, and that transporting several dozen (or sometimes several hundred) metres of cable required a vehicle, the company tried not only to impose on the shantytown dwellers the symbolic violence of its reaffirmed presence – perceived as an intrusion – but also to increase their costs as much as possible. While the disconnection campaigns were not effective in that they did not prevent illegal electrification, they aimed to minimize its attraction by getting the shantytown dwellers and public authorities interested in ‘legal electrification’: the aim was to get the inhabitants used to the idea that it was more worthwhile to pay to get a regular, good-quality supply of electricity than to continue with a piracy practice that was getting disproportionately costly. Lydec’s managers also thought that the existence of a strong mobilization among the inhabitants in favour of electrification would help to pressure the authorities into agreeing to connect the shantytown to the city’s grid. . . . that proved counterproductive: organized resistance in the shantytowns and the cycle of reprisals The disconnection campaigns organized by the private operator prompted a radical mobilization for electricity in the shantytowns. The 1998–1999 Lydec activity report acknowledged that ‘the consequence of these campaigns was: increasingly ingenious take-offs which made fault-finding very difficult – Lydec agents now being unable to go to certain districts’. The 2001 activity report also admitted that ‘the effectiveness [of the disconnection campaigns] remains very limited in terms of impact on efficiency, owing to the speed with which the inhabitants reconnect’. The scale of some disconnection operations reveals (or at least allows one to guess) the extent of the phenomenon of electricity piracy in many shantytowns: in Carrières Centrales on 16 December 2000, Lydec staff intervened in 10 cases of fraud; in Chihane shantytown, on 17 January 2001, 600 metres of cable were removed; in Thomas shantytown, on 22 March 2001, 2 tonnes of cable and 7 posts were taken down (bimonthly report February–March 2001, ‘less-favoured districts’ section). The hostility of the inhabitants to intervention by Lydec in the shantytown grew with the development of the disconnection operations, and continued even after the principle of electrifying the shantytowns had been accepted. It was during the intermediate phase, during which the shantytowns were awaiting legal electrification, but were subject to the surveillance of the private utility staff, that violence against employees of the private utility reached a peak. Several incidents 125

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illustrate the hardening of relations between the different actors and the logic of reprisals taken by certain karianis. On 29 June 1998, a complaint from the inhabitants of the Bradâa district in Mohammedia was registered following an electricity cut caused by clandestine connections to a shantytown. Following repairs to the damaged high-voltage station, an operation to dismantle the ‘pirate’ connections was organized on 30 June. During that operation, Lydec staff were threatened by the inhabitants (verbal intimidation, threats with knives and stone throwing). Late in the afternoon of the same day, a steel cable was intentionally thrown onto the electricity line serving the district’s supply station, causing a power cut in the eastern part of the city: the law faculty and surroundings, the technical college and surroundings, Monica plage and surroundings, the Koudia and Oued el Makhazine housing estate, the whole municipality of El Mansouria as far as Bouznika, the service stations on the Casablanca-Rabat motorway and the Neffifikh–Ben Nabet junction (emergency supply to the Bouznika royal palace). At 22.00 hours the supply came on again. The next day, a 4-metre concrete reinforcement bar was again intentionally thrown onto the Bradâa high-voltage junction at the same place ‘by way of reprisal’. The high-voltage feeder finally had to be isolated from the grid. As one of the staff of Lydec’s ‘less-favoured districts’ team pointed out: ‘we then entered a guerrilla phase. It was a real declaration of war; there was a clear intent to damage the company’s interests and an attempt to intimidate the staff.’ A letter from Lydec’s representative for the Anfa prefecture addressed to the Governor of Greater Casablanca on 14 December 1999 made reference to incidents occurring over the previous months and linked to electricity piracy in the shantytown of Bachkou. In particular, the letter recounts the difficulties faced by the Lydec staff in repairing an electricity substation located near the shantytown: the shantytown dwellers had in fact fixed their own padlock on the substation. Following two consecutive fires at the public lighting switchboard (not designed to handle the consumption of the shantytown dwellers), the shanty-town dwellers gained access to the substation by forcing an entry and connected their cables directly to the distribution board, part of which had already been completely destroyed. The danger involved made the shanty-town dwellers’ action seem like a commando operation: entry to these substations (where voltages up to 22,000 volts are present) is allowed only to staff equipped with special protective clothing and who have received appropriate training. Following a renewed outbreak of problems at several substations near Bachkou in 2001, Lydec organized roundthe-clock guarding of the shantytown supply points by paid police officers: eight officers were employed, from 14 June 2001 to 10 July 2001, at the cost of 118,990 dirhams. It seems that the disconnection campaigns helped to improve the circulation of information between the various shantytowns in the city area, and thus gave rise to myths that, according to their own statements, had a significant impact on the actors’ plans.26 The shantytown dwellers were increasingly unwilling to accept Lydec’s disconnections since they were aware of precedents showing that the 126

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private utility, even when assisted by the police, could be foiled by the inhabitants’ initiatives. Often, the interviewees had not actually taken part in the confrontations with Lydec staff. They reported them rather as if they had taken place at an indeterminate time and place. The accounts of the conflicts with the private utility’s representatives were also often punctuated with incredible episodes of chases, and embellished with dramatic details, without any apparent need to prove the accuracy of the reported facts. The dismantling operations were also regarded as illegitimate, especially as other shantytowns were allowed a connection to the city electricity grid. While the interviewees often based their statements on concrete facts, more vague and more approximate knowledge also played a part: hearsay and rumour contributed to the formation of shantytown legends which also helped to develop the karianis’ expectations and urge them to consider new forms of action, solutions and outcomes: My sister lives with her husband at Hay Hassani, at the Sidi Hajjaj camp, and they have electricity over there: they have to pay for it but they have light. They’re OK. Whereas here we pay, but Lydec comes and cuts us off and we have to pay again. Here, the wires are always going up or coming down. I don’t know why we have to suffer when everything’s fine and civilised in other places. (Hassna, El Qabla) One of these days there’ll be a bust-up, because I know that in other places where the people are pretty fearsome (wa‘rîn) and brazen (dasrîn), around Sidi Moumen for example, the Lydec people don’t go there, and if they’re sent they shake in their shoes. (Abdellah, El Qabla) The ongoing electrification process seems to have had the effect of authenticating and certifying the effectiveness of the shantytown dwellers’ mobilization. In the minds of the shantytown dwellers it helped to make their campaign more visible, even if it was in fact an independent phenomenon. Indeed, it is true that the disconnection campaigns started after the public authorities had given their agreement in principle to the electrification of the Casablanca shantytowns and the electrification had already begun. It is nonetheless also true that the violence of the shantytown dwellers’ reaction to the disconnection campaigns gave the private utility an additional argument to use with the administration to justify connecting a particular shantytown to the electricity grid, in the context of a case-by-case negotiation of each electrification. Piracy turns professional Several Lydec employees said that they were convinced that the organizers of the electricity piracy intentionally kept alive the myth of the dangers of piracy by dramatizing their action and exaggerating its risks, in order to preserve their 127

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monopoly and to consolidate mobilization in the shantytown. They nevertheless acknowledged the pirates’ skill and spoke of them to their managers as true professionals. The organizers of the piracy ‘know perfectly well what they’re doing’, and ‘in any case are real electricians’ who ‘whatever you do, will always get to [Lydec’s] wires somehow’. It was a far cry from makeshift splices carried out with whatever was at hand, and the pirates’ head electricians did a professional job, and sometimes even connected via underground branching networks (Lydec activity report, ‘less-favoured districts’ section, September 1998–September 1999). Thus the pirates’ organization was structured in a way that was unheard of in the early days of electricity fraud in the shantytowns. It is particularly difficult to date accurately the appearance of electricity theft in any particular shantytown, and to find out who first ‘dared’ to do it: the interviewees have confused memories of the beginnings of the phenomenon, and proved unable to assess clearly the first time they had access to electricity; surveys of the same family sometimes produced dates as far as ten years apart. The vagueness of their memories is all the more remarkable since electricity theft led to a very clear transformation of every-day life, and all the interviewees made a very clear distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’ the light: When we took the electricity, it was a kind of relief (rtâhîna). We no longer lived in fear of fires, or drug addicts and alcoholics with candles. I felt mentally more rested and calm. The night was no longer an enemy, you see. (Karim, El Qabla) It wasn’t just light that came in with the [electricity] wires. We also got television [TV], then a fridge, soaps, parties, laughing, relaxation, and the kids could also do their homework. We started to live a little at least, although we still have a very simple life. (Hmed, El Khlifa) The surveys recorded a memory of the days ‘without light’ as intolerable. If the origins of the piracy seem to be indeterminate or hazy, it is because it began at an uncertain time, made up of aborted advances, blocked initiatives, new starts and was consolidated slowly and gradually, ‘silently’ according to Asef Bayat27 Piracy gradually became a part of the inhabitants’ strategies of getting by, and ended up being endemic. Looking at the architects of electricity theft, one realizes that those who boasted of having instigated the phenomenon in the early 1990s – and they are fairly numerous – were not the same as those who were directing and coordinating the piracy just before Lydec’s electrification, and did not always move in the same circles. In the early days of the piracy, the pioneers recount that they set up their wires at night, and took them down at dawn so as to avoid attracting the authorities’ attention: their connections were perfunctory, and the quality of the supply often very poor. Permanent and more sophisticated connections by the leaders of the

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professional piracy followed (according to the statements, around 1994–1995). The ideological inspiration for electricity fraud and its rational development across the whole shantytown were due to two different categories of actors. Those who inspired the piracy were generally individuals who had a greater than normal familiarity with political matters, and were known for their protesting skills; agitators, ‘tough nuts’, used to expressing themselves in the language of leadership and to confronting the authorities, at least verbally. The ‘doers’ were technicians interested in the day-to-day full-scale application of piracy (which was their main activity). Theft developed first of all by imitation of the pioneers: it then spread by capillary action under the influence of the ‘ideologues of the light’. At this stage, it was not so much a collective mobilization as the sum of individual or interindividual initiatives (a group of neighbours connected the wires, a wire was ‘given’ to a friend or relation whose shack was not too far away). The shantytown dwellers were looking for an immediate gain – access to electricity. But their initiative also took on a political aspect, in that it also represented an act of resistance to the rules imposed. However, it was in reaction to Lydec’s intransigent procedures that the individual fraud operations began to aggregate together in a coherent way, giving rise to a collective mobilization. In the case of electricity piracy, the concept of the free ride does not exist, or at least not in the same way as in the classic cases of fighting for a common good, where the individual can seek to benefit from the positive spin-off of the mobilization without taking part in it. Since the coveted good could be enjoyed immediately after diversion, the shantytown dwellers had a specific, individual and direct interest in the theft. The more the shantytown’s sky seemed criss-crossed with wires, the more the roofs of the shacks sported dish aerials, the less the pirates ran the risk of individual penalties (collective sanctions generally being limited to disconnection campaigns, as we have seen above). It is true that the proliferation of cables, in contrast to a gathering crowd, was no guarantee of anonymity: the fixed installation was always the pirates’Achilles’ heel. But the more this ‘evidence’ of the wires existed on a large scale, the more those who connected were likely to get away with it. With piracy, pressure of numbers comes into play and the case was perceived differently from more conventional protest actions, such as demonstrations, marches, or even riots: it was neither the individuals who were present in person, nor the bodies or the voices that occupied the space to demonstrate the force of numbers, but rather the cables that marked the perimeter within which the inhabitants exerted and asserted their power. In contrast to the ‘street strategies’ analysed by Olivier Fillieule in the French context, where the point is to make oneself seen and heard to assert one’s legitimacy and show evidence of effectiveness,28 piracy in the Moroccan shantytowns sneaked silently in. It is true that the development of piracy can be regarded as counterproductive as soon as consumption in the shantytowns reached such a level that it put undue

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pressure on an underpowered electricity grid. This counterproductivity and the increasing number of incidents on the grid were nevertheless an essential argument in the test of strength with the public authorities to obtain permission to electrify the shantytowns (as the authorities’ agreement was needed for each shantytown individually). But let us return to the organization of the human resources involved in electricity piracy. Just before Lydec’s electrification of the Carrières Centrales began, the piracy was orchestrated by a community that the company’s staff openly described as a real mafia. In each of the six districts of Carrières Centrales, there was at least one full-time electrician. He generally had one or two assistants or apprentices under his supervision. Every evening, even at weekends, the pirate technicians organized a standby service, with at least one technician available somewhere in the shantytown. If their ‘pirate electrician’ was absent, the inhabitants of a district could therefore call upon the skills of those responsible for other districts. Several of those interviewed linked the introduction of this well-organized system to the arrival of a young generation of electricians at Carrières Centrales. Thus, in one district, it was after the first chief electrician (aged around 50 and qualified at a vocational training centre) took his ‘retirement’ following a serious accident – a potentially fatal electrical discharge – that his successors changed the methods he had introduced. Until then, he had worked only with an apprentice in his thirties that he had trained himself. The apprentice, when taking over the district’s electrical affairs, adopted a new intervention policy: he passed on his experience to not one but five or six young people (I was unable to ascertain the exact number) so as to cover a larger area in a more systematic way. Other shantytown dwellers, the treasurers, were made responsible for collecting the funds. In this way I met Youssef who, for eighteen months, kept the accounts of his district’s electrician, just before Lydec introduced electricity. His status as a student of his superior, his position as a ‘child of the district’ (ould ed-derb), and the friendship between his mother and the specialist’s mother made him an ideal funds collector. The prominent role of emotional ties and acquaintances in the formation of the networks of professional pirates shows that the mobilization work was not merely a matter of logistics, as some simplified versions of the mobilization of resources would have us believe, but that the mobilizations also relied on social networks. If relationships of trust were established and the system worked, it was also because it was made up of insiders, members of the shantytown who lived there, whom the consumers knew and met every day. According to Youssef, the inhabitants had to pay a monthly price that was basically fixed (between 40 and 100 dirhams on average in the various districts of Carrières Centrales) plus an initial connection fee: this charge covered the expenses of maintaining the pirate network but the shantytown dwellers often had to bear substantial additional costs when Lydec staff removed or destroyed a large amount of equipment, or if part of the equipment became unusable in the event of a short circuit. The money might be collected every week or every month, 130

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depending on the shantytown dwellers’ ability to pay. Youssef stressed that there was real mutual help between households, underlining the fraternal and generous mentality of the karianis: although, for Françoise Navez-Bouchanine, it was rather the particularly attractive cost–benefit ratio that created the solidarity between households.29 According to Youssef, only the electricians received money in the days of the piracy. He estimated their monthly wages at least 3,000 dirhams (substantially above the guaranteed minimum wage of less than 1,900 dirhams). We have seen that by participating in the electricity fraud, the shantytown dwellers had immediate access to electricity, but that they were also subject to effective management and collection mechanisms that underpinned the development of an informal electrification process. As the piracy became more radical, (electrical) power was concentrated in the hands of a small minority of participants in the organization who held decisive resources that the other shantytown dwellers did not. The conversion of the pirates: legalization of status, economic crisis and loss of prestige Once the electrification process began, the leaders of the piracy were not totally deprived of their specific status: some of them were indeed able to convert their authority in the area of piracy into an institutionalized power. Given the illegal occupancy of the land, it was impossible to establish ordinary individual contracts with the shantytown dwellers. The exceptional nature of the electrification of the kariens was dealt with by installing communal meters by block (comprising between 20 and 50 shacks). The subscription contracts were signed only with the ‘representative’ (amîn, plural oumanâ’) of each block, who was solely responsible for paying the communal bill. The choice of such a system overcame the difficulties arising from the exceptional nature of the shantytown dwellers’ right to electricity, and dramatized the problematic character of that right. By refusing the karianis the status of full customers with the right to an individuated treatment, the firm and the public authorities highlighted the material and symbolic marginality of the shantytowns. It is clear that the group payment option also facilitated, from the practical point of view, Lydec’s money collection operation, as the representatives were responsible for collecting the amount owed to the company from the various households on the block, each with its own meter. As payment for their collection work, they received a commission based on the inhabitants’ consumption. In theory, it was for the karianis to designate the oumanâ’. In practice, since consultations were complicated to implement, the representatives were appointed by the commune, based on the recommendations of the elected representative of the local district. The oumanâ’ did not have to satisfy any technical requirement: this enabled some illiterate people, incapable of reading the figures on the meters but enjoying a reputation for honesty and rectitude in the community, to be appointed. Very often, however, the choice was based not so much on the integrity 131

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of the individuals but rather on their past involvement in the piracy organization. According to the private utility’s staff, the local elected representatives often (if not systematically) recommended the former leaders of the illegal electrification. The conversion of the pirates, whose status changed from orchestrators of the electricity fraud to collaborators with Lydec, was no secret, either to the public authorities or to the staff of the private utility. And yet they did not try to oppose a development perceived by the inhabitants as a natural progression: the authority and prominence of these people in the shantytown’s electrical affairs was already assured. There was also the risk that they might become significant elements of resistance to the normalization of the situation owing to the loss of earnings that the process of legal electrification would otherwise have meant for them. The electrification of the shantytown also brought the amateur pirates of the first generation back into the limelight. After being excluded from the organization of the mobilization by the piracy technicians, the ideologues of electricity diversion made a comeback, heading the protest movement that grew up in Carrières Centrales in the summer of 2003 among the oumanâ’ (although it did not enlist much support from the population). With no status other than customers of the company (the subscription contracts were signed with them alone), earning not a fixed wage but a limited commission on electricity consumption,30 some representatives refused for several months to pay Lydec the money that they had collected from the inhabitants. It was the first generation of pirates, the politicized kind, who led the protest movement whose progress we shall not analyse here, but which revealed both the pirates’ aspirations and their inability to integrate into the formal system in a way that was satisfactory to them, as the balance of power was in fact so unfavourable. The role of the local elected representatives The local elected representatives (especially the presidents of the communes) played a decisive role in the struggle to persuade the public authorities to accept the principle of the official electrification of the shantytowns. As intermediaries between the authorities, the private utility and the shantytown dwellers, they endeavoured to reconcile the divergent interests, trying to appear as good representatives in the eyes of their electorate while maintaining good relations with government. Nevertheless, the essential nature of the struggle for electricity in the shantytowns often forced the councillors of the communes into direct opposition to the public authorities, in this way making a substantial contribution to the evolution of the situation. The struggle for electrification took place in a specific political context: the opening-up – certainly relative but not without practical effects – of the field of electoral competition in the 1990s. The organization of ballots where the voters’ choice was less dependent on government control helped to stimulate real competition between candidates, and to change their tactics for canvassing the voters. Voting became less automatically associated in the shantytowns with an

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emergency financial transaction and was increasingly subject to concrete action by politicians, who had to defend the shantytown dwellers’ interests and demonstrate their ability to improve their living standards, even if they had to defy the authorities and act on the fringes of the law. It will be remembered that in order to ensure that the disconnection campaigns ran smoothly, the private utility had requested and obtained (in a more systematic way from late 2000) the support of the police forces. Thus each week Lydec notified the prefecture (and also the commune concerned) of the programme of operations planned for the following seven days, so that the police or auxiliary forces could be mobilized on the basis of a pre-established timetable. The disconnection operations were organized very early in the morning (between 05.00 and 07.00), in order to avoid the risk of protest from too many inhabitants: the aim was to be effective by acting as discreetly as possible, and to ‘strike’ while the shantytown and its inhabitants were still asleep. And yet, despite these precautions, it seems that fairly often (and almost systematically in certain shantytowns) Lydec was unable to get near to the illegal connections: when the officials arrived, shantytown dwellers had already met at the site where it was planned to disconnect the wires and it was impossible to carry out the work. The increasing number of aborted operations led the company to suspect ‘leaks’, mainly from the communes. The local elected representatives, notified of the timetable of disconnection operations (faxed to the office of the president of the commune) were tempted to pass on the information to their voters in order to gain an obvious political advantage. This hypothesis rings all the truer since, in many cases, these elected representative themselves lived in the shantytown and were directly affected by Lydec’s action: there was a personal material motive as well as the political advantage. Thereafter, the disconnection programmes were faxed only to the office of the governor of the prefectures concerned. It also seems that some commune presidents went so far as to organize the illegal connection of their electorate, getting commune electricians to make illegal connections. In a letter addressed by Lydec’s prefectoral official in Sidi BernoussiZenata to the president of a commune in that prefecture, dated 28 January 2002, the prefectoral official accused the commune’s staff of entering a distribution station where access was strictly reserved to authorized staff of the private utility. In another shantytown attached to the same prefecture (but not the same commune), after a disconnection operation in the presence of the local authorities and a reinforced police brigade at 22.00 hours one evening in March 2001, the Lydec staff found that the shantytown dwellers were reconnected the next day by a team from the commune using a lift truck, in the presence of the elected representative of the shantytown who claimed to have the governor’s permission. Acceptance of the principle of electrification of the Casablanca shantytowns substantially altered the margins for manoeuvre and the strategies of the local elected representatives: indeed, they were placed at the centre of the procedure that forbade Lydec from electrifying a shantytown until the commune president made

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an application on behalf of the inhabitants. This monopoly of initiative was of special political importance in that there was high public demand for electrification. It was, therefore, used by the local elected representatives or candidates during their campaigns to attract and pressure their electorate and strengthen patronage links, especially since it allowed them to repay collective electoral allegiance by supplying a single service, rather than by allocating individual services. The Lydec employees openly described electrification as being used as a tool during elections, and the shantytown dwellers were perfectly well aware of this. According to the statements of certain employees, the permits granted by the outgoing presidents increased noticeably during campaign periods: a ‘grant’ of light was liable to ensure re-election or access to a seat at national level. Conversely, a delay in the electrification of a shantytown district could be a punishment to electors who were insufficiently obedient. However, a shantytown cannot be electrified without the written agreement of the governor of the prefecture to which it is attached. Thus, the issue of connecting kariens to the city’s electricity grid could also be used by the public authorities to favour the re-election of a commune president or to promote him to a parliamentary post, or on the other hand to challenge his legitimacy and damage his political career.

Conclusion In conclusion, the shantytown dwellers, aware of the conflicting goals of the actors they faced, took advantage of the situation and managed to retain their progressively acquired benefits, transforming some of them into permanent gains. The conviction that they were fighting for their legitimate right to electricity, incited the inhabitants to evolve from rather quiet and basic piracy practices to more organized, but also more violent, guerrilla-like forms of struggle. The connection of the Casablanca shantytown dwellers to the city electric network resulted from an objective alliance between Lydec and the karianis: it was the localized consequence of an encounter between a logic of privatization and that of a collective claim on infrastructure. Economic liberalization does not only produce ‘premium networked spaces’:31 it also enables a differentiated integration to the network from below. However, such an integration does not automatically lead to a better assimilation in the city and its social fabric. It is true that the electrification process contributed to a better recognition of the shantytown dwellers as city-dwellers (even if, as we saw, the technical solution chosen for the electrification of kariens emphasized their symbolic disqualification). Indeed, it may be considered as a new factor of exclusion: if it allows a better quality of current, legal electrification is costlier than piracy. It transformed the karianis from citizens to consumers by replacing the notion of absolute (human) rights with that of a right to services. Thus the logic of privatization tended to atomize the original mobilization by creating conflicting interests between those who were able to afford the price of light and those who were poorer and who would eventually be excluded from the network.

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Notes 1 ‘Karien’ is a common Moroccan dialect word for shantytown. It is a corruption of the French word ‘carrières’ (quarries), from the name of the first large shantytown in Casablanca, the ‘Carrières Centrales’. This shantytown – moved several times since – thus keeps the name of the Roches Noires power station where the building’s construction workers set up camp. They erected their temporary housing in an old disused quarry near to the power station ‘centrale’. Hence the name ‘Karien Central’ (power station quarries). By extension, a ‘kariani’ is an inhabitant of the shantytowns, a shanty-town dweller. See for example André Adam, Casablanca, essai sur la transformation de la société marocaine au contact de l’Occident (Paris: éditions du CNRS, 1972), 86. 2 In a 1997 decision of the Council of the Urban Community of Casablanca, Lydec was designated as the manager of electricity and drinking water distribution and liquid waste disposal for Casablanca and Mohammadia. Large international groups have shares in its capital: the company is owned 35 per cent by Suez Environnement, 24 per cent by Elyo, 18 per cent by Endesa Europe, 18 per cent by EDF International, and 5 per cent by Agbarex. 3 Ben M’sik is one of the oldest and most important Casablanca shantytowns. 4 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 5 See Sylvy Jaglin, Services d’eau en Afrique subsaharienne, La fragmentation urbain en question (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2005). See also Sarah Botton, ‘Les “débranchés” des réseaux urbains d’eau et d’électricité à Buenos Aires: opportunité commerciale ou risque pour les opérateurs’, Flux, n⬚ 56–7 (April– September, 2004). 6 Simon and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, chapter 2. 7 Sylby Jaglin, Services d’eau, 62. 8 Abdelmajid Arrif, ‘Les compétences citadines à l’épreuve de l’exclusion : l’exemple du bidonville de Ben M’Sik’, in L’urbain dans le monde arabe : politiques, instruments et acteurs, ed. Pierre Signoles (Paris: CNRS, 1999), 300. 9 Shantytowns have long been considered by the public authorities as ‘vote-tanks’: their inhabitants amenable to vote-buying as well as easily submitting to the ‘recommendations’ of the State agents. However, this characteristic tends to disappear as the shantytown dwellers get used to voting, and as the traditional political patronage gives way to a competitive one with the liberalization of the political sphere: see Lamia Zaki, Pratiques politiques au bidonville, Casablanca (2000–2005), Thèse de Science Politique (IEP de Paris, 2005). 10 Nadia Khouri-Dagher, ‘Crise de l’Etat-providence et ordre social au Caire’, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1991), 35. 11 Michel De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 12 The administration repeatedly adopted an ambivalent stance in its policy relating to the shantytowns; it seems that Lydec was never able to establish whether the government electrification permits needed to undertake work had to be signed by the governor of the prefecture or whether the signature of the commune president was a sufficient legal guarantee. ‘When in doubt’ (as a manager in the ‘less-favoured districts’ section put it), the company always endeavoured to obtain both signatures before starting on the electrification of a shantytown. 13 See for example Myriam Catusse, ‘L’entrée en politique des entrepreneurs au Maroc: libéralisation économique et réforme de l’ordre politique’, thesis defended at the University of Aix-Marseille (2000); Béatrice Hibou and Mohammed Tozy, ‘Une lecture d’anthropologie politique de la corruption au Maroc: fondement historique

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14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

d’une prise de liberté avec le droit’, Tiers-Monde, Vol. 41, No. 161 (January–March 2000); Guilain Denoeux, ‘Understanding Morocco’s ‘sanitation campaign’, Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1998). In their analysis of the Moroccan sanitization campaign, the authors show how the increasing prominence of a socioeconomic group (that of the entrepreneurs), which was acquiring a threatening political weight, constituted one of the reasons that induced the Government to act. Tolerance, or even encouragement, of illicit practices had until then been one of the authorities’ means of co-opting economic elites, and most of these were reintroduced after the campaign. The company owns the power until it reaches the customer, as well as the electrical distribution equipment. One shantytown district, El Qabla, was not included in the electrification process because its inhabitants were expected very soon to be moved to a new lot of social housing nearing completion. Here we keep in mind the warning by Michel Dobry, who denounces ‘the old scheme explaining, in a superbly circular way, the emergence of collective action, mobilization or protest by the miracle of prior knowledge of the action’. See Michel Dobry, ‘Les causalités de l’improbable et du probable: notes à propos des manifestations de 1989 en Europe centrale et orientale’, Cultures et conflits, 17 (Spring 1995): 116. One should not restrict oneself to trying to identify determining factors upstream of the phenomena to be explained. Neither is electricity theft regarded as a ‘transparent’, immediately intelligible and natural form of mobilization: electricity theft is viewed as a process resulting from the interaction of many factors and action by actors of several types. Nonetheless, the awareness of the unbearable nature of ‘life in the shadows’ (l-hayât f-dlâm), as one interviewee put it, is one of the factors behind the mobilization, and is also explained, as we shall see, by a specific political context. William A. Gamson, Bruce Firemna and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1982), 7. Serge Paugam, La disqualification sociale : essai sur la nouvelle pauvreté (Paris: PUF, 1997), 147. Norbert Elias shows that outsiders are viewed as a lower quality of human: ‘as long as the power differential remains large and submission inevitable, groups of intruders experience their power inferiority emotionally as a sign of human inferiority.’ See Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, Logiques de l’exclusion : enquête sociologique au cœur des problèmes d’une communauté (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 29, 42. David Snow and Robert Benford, ‘Ideology, frame resonance, and participant mobilization’, in From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures, ed. B. Klandermans, H. Kriesi , S. Tarrow (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1988). Maryvonne David-Jougneau, Le dissident et l’institution, ou Alice au pays des normes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 94. Olivier Fillieule and Cécile Péchu, Lutter ensemble : les théories de l’action collective (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 163–4. This accords with what William Gamson showed in his analysis on the political proficiency of ordinary Americans (Encounters with Unjust Authority). Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi and Olivier Fillieule, ‘Exit, voice, loyalty et bien d’autres choses encore . . .’, in Résistances et protestations dans les sociétés musulmanes, ed. Mounia Bennani Chraïbi and Olivier Fillieule (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2003), 90. The procedure to combat fraud became systematic under the ‘tough action’ policy adopted after the meeting of the Directorate-General in March 2001. The first dismantling operations took place in 1998. They became more frequent from the end of 2000. In 2001, 220 illegal connections were cut off, or more than double the number carried out the previous year. It was in the prefecture of Aïn Sebaâ-Hay Mohammadi that the disconnection programmes were busiest (ten operations planned from 2 October to

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26

27 28 29 30

31

1 November 2001; seven from 8 to 15 November; fifteen from 26 December 2001 to 31 January 2002). Thus information plays an important role in the unfolding of the action, in that the ‘fate of local mobilization seems to depend to a large extent on information on what is happening (or could happen) at other similar sites.’ See Dobry, ‘Les causalités de l’improbable et du probable’, 120. Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Olivier Fillieule, Stratégies de la rue : les manifestations en France (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997). Françoise Navez-Bouchanine (ed.), Bilan empirique, étude des attitudes des populations face aux interventions sur les bidonvilles (Rabat: ANHI, June 2001), 88. The representatives are entitled to a margin between the price per kilowatt-hour that they have to pay Lydec and the rate they charge the consumers. At Carrières Centrales, the representatives pay 0.87 dirhams per kilowatt-hour consumed, but charge the shanty-town dwellers 1 dirham per kilowatt-hour. Each meter at the head of the street (a communal meter for each block of inhabitants) records consumption of between 600 and 1,500 kilowatt-hours per month: therefore, representatives earn between 100 and 200 dirhams (10–20 euros) per block that they are responsible for, over half of them being responsible for more than one block. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism.

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Part III PEASANTS AND NOMADS

6 RESISTING THE NEW STATE The rural poor, land and modernity in Iran, 1921–1941 Stephanie Cronin

In the two decades between his arrival in power in 1921 via a coup d’état and his abdication in 1941, Riza Shah presided over a period of profound political, economic and social change in Iran, unprecedented in its scope and in its pace. Throughout the country the rural poor, both the settled peasants and the pastoral nomads, were deeply affected by the upheavals unleashed by the regime’s choice of authoritarian state-building and modernization based on European models. Both nomads and peasants suffered materially as a consequence of the general development policies implemented by the new state and by the khans’ and the landowners’ adoption of the new state’s ideological outlook, especially its attitude towards private property, and the resulting efforts by rural elites to assert their personal and absolute ownership over resources hitherto held collectively or contingently. However, contrary to the conventional assumptions of rural passivity, held by both Western scholarship and Iranian nationalism, peasant and nomad communities in fact generated a variety of active responses to the regime’s initiatives, both on their own account and in combination with other social forces, aimed at defending themselves and resisting unfavourable changes in their relations with landlords and state officials. These responses varied in both character and duration. Sharecroppers formed committees and made collective bids to improve the terms of their contracts with landowners, in at least one case generating a movement which affected a number of villages and lasted over several years. Peasants and nomads presented petitions to the Majlis and the shah outlining their grievances and asking for redress, took their complaints to the press, and occasionally managed to launch actions against their landlords in court. In the late 1920s, as the regime entered a radical phase of rapid centralization and Westernization, sections of the still armed and mobile nomadic tribes, supported by a groundswell of peasant resentment, launched uprisings directed against both the new authorities and their own aristocracies. During the 1930s, as the weight of the new state became heavier, those to whom the option was available developed a strategy of

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avoidance based on an almost institutionalized system of bribery, while the most pauperized sections of particularly the nomadic poor, as economic conditions in the countryside deteriorated, resorted to banditry and smuggling as strategies of resistance and survival. The rural poor appear to have been influenced in formulating these responses by the changes in their own circumstances, by their experiences as migrant workers, and by new ideas transmitted both by members of their own communities who had been drawn into the urban milieu and by dissident elements of their own ruling elites. These processes appear to have been particularly advanced in the south of the country and to have had a marked impact on southern tribal confederations such as the Bakhtiyari, perhaps as a result of these groups’ extensive involvement as labourers in the oil industry and the advanced integration of their khans into the political and economic elite.1

Methods and theory Efforts to excavate the experience of the rural poor in Iran have been beset both by methodological difficulties and by theoretical and ideological obstacles. Although it has been argued recently that a critical re-reading of traditional texts may yield material with which to reconstruct the history of non-elite groups, both in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East,2 yet it remains clear that the sparsity of sources constitutes a serious problem. Archival research in Iran, itself a recent phenomenon, has so far failed to locate significant documentation in which the rural poor have themselves directly recorded and articulated their history.3 Theoretical and ideological assumptions have also hindered and distorted research into the responses of the rural poor in Iran to the ‘top-down modernization’ which characterized the early Pahlavi period. Western scholarship has been largely uninterested in the conditions of the rural poor in Iran and its indifference was reinforced by the inclinations of the nationalist elite in power in Iran till 1979.4 The Pahlavi elite, overwhelmingly urban with its economic base remaining in absentee landlordism until the land reform of the early 1960s, was eager to embrace, in this respect if in no other, Marx’s characterization of the peasantry as so many sacks of potatoes.5 The inclinations of both scholarship and politics have, therefore, tended to combine to resist any notion of peasants and nomads as active agents in the broad historical processes of which they were central components but have rather preferred to see the rural poor purely as so much fodder for the execution of the state’s fiscal and military policies. The account which follows, although based on fragmentary sources, attempts to begin to piece together a picture of the impact of the changes of the early Pahlavi period on various categories of the rural poor. It will focus in particular on the range of actual responses generated by the peasants and nomads themselves to the changes of these years and such efforts as they were able to make to defend their own conditions and advance their own interests, vis-à-vis both landlord and khan and the new state.

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Rural discontent and unrest has traditionally been conceptualized purely in terms of actual peasant rebellion, usually prolonged and fairly large-scale, typically accompanied by a campaign of violence against landlords and the slaughter of their agents. In Iran, with the partial exception of the Caspian provinces, this dramatic dimension of rural protest has been largely absent.6 The lack of widespread and violent peasant uprisings in Iran, in the twentieth century and earlier, has encouraged an assumption that the peasantry was most inclined to resort to a strategy of passive endurance, ‘a certain technique of fatalism’,7 a strategy mitigated by occasional flight, either to more remote regions or, later, away from the land altogether, and, until this option was closed down in the late 1920s, partial or complete renomadization. Regarding the inter-war decades in particular, although a time when profound changes were affecting rural Iran, scholarly research has, in general, been largely content to see the countryside and its population through the eyes of urban nationalism, as a vast hinterland primitive in outlook and mired in stagnation. Even sympathetic accounts of the hardships and privations of peasant life in this period have largely depicted the peasantry as passive, apathetic and apolitical or conservative. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged both this general historical assumption of peasant passivity in Iran and the notion that peasant resistance only or most importantly manifests itself through sustained and violent rebellion.8 In an early attempt to explain the general absence of peasant rebellion in Iran, Farhad Kazemi and Ervand Abrahamian emphasized that such an absence should not be taken to imply an acceptance of the established order. On the contrary, they drew attention to evidence of the intense hatred for the landlord which the peasant only dared express privately and obliquely and the prevalence of village riots and local protests, and the utilization of ‘weapons of the weak’, including concealment of the crop, tax evasion, withholding rents, the protection of outlaws and even the taking of sanctuary in town mosques.9 In her recent study of the constitutional period, Janet Afary has uncovered significant rural dimensions to the radical activism of the period. These included peasant protests and strikes, petitions and letters by and on behalf of the peasants to newspapers and Majlis delegates, the formation of rural anjumans (assemblies), and actual rebellions in the more prosperous areas of Gilan and Azarbayjan.10 In an account of the land reform of the early 1960s, Mohammad Gholi Majd has documented extraordinary levels of anti-landlord violence and peasant seizure and occupation of landowners’ estates and Ahmad Ashraf and Shaul Bakhash have both discussed the struggles which broke out over land in the years immediately after the 1979 revolution.11 Interest in early Pahlavi Iran, however, has tended to remain focused on state policy and very little research has been carried out into the actual impact of the legislative, political and economic changes of the period on the rural population in general.12 Nonetheless, despite the still primitive state of research it is still clear that, as Afary and Majd have observed in relation to the upheavals of the

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constitutional and ‘White’ revolutions,13 so too the rapid changes of the early Pahlavi period evoked a range of active responses from the rural poor themselves, both settled peasants and pastoral nomads. There is considerable evidence that they both acutely perceived the significance of the changes in their circumstances, and attempted to intervene to defend themselves and modify the terms of their relationship with landlord and state. They resented the enhancements of private property rights and even occasionally rejected in principle the very foundation of landlord power.

The agrarian structure The early Pahlavi period was a time of profound change in the Iranian countryside. During these years, although there was substantial overall population growth and a degree of shift to the urban and industrial sectors, the vast majority of the Iranian people continued to live in the rural areas. The rural population was made up of an elite of tribal khans and landlords and a mass of tribally organized pastoral nomads, semi-settled cultivators and, the largest group, settled peasant cultivators, both tribal and non-tribal.14 Landlords of any size were almost always absentee and urban-based, and even the khans were increasingly divorced from their pastoral followers, successfully integrating themselves into the urban elite. The settled peasantry was, in particular, also highly stratified internally, and consisted of a small number of peasant proprietors, sharecroppers who had a customary right (nasaq) to cultivate a subsistence plot of land, and a growing number of landless agricultural labourers who had no such right. The distinction between those who possessed a nasaq and those who did not was acute.15 Set against the growing stratification were mechanisms which tended to promote solidarity such as the bunah, a peasant work team organized to carry out agricultural tasks.16 Sometimes, too, tribal ties persisted among the settled peasantry. The rural population faced dramatically varying economic and social conditions, ranging from the increasing penetration of capitalist relations to the persistence of slave raiding and trafficking on areas abutting the Gulf coast.17 Although the nationalist elite, itself an almost exclusively urban phenomenon, was little interested in agricultural development or the needs of the countryside, yet the rural population was profoundly affected by the legal, economic, political and social changes of the period. The legislation concerning land ownership transformed the context within which landlords and peasants, and khans and nomads, conducted their relations. These legal changes, combined with the economic policies adopted by the regime, especially the decision to raise internal resources for development through indirect taxes, namely monopolies on tea and sugar, drove down living standards and resulted in widespread pauperization. The state’s rapid modernization drive, including measures such as conscription, which fell most heavily on the settled peasantry, and nomadic settlement, with its devastating effect on the pastoral economy, complicated and made vastly more burdensome the rural poor’s relationship with urban and official Iran.18 144

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The new regime of Riza Shah, in accordance with its broad modernist approach, adopted étatiste economic policies and concentrated its efforts on the development of modern industry and the construction of nationwide systems of communication, roads, ports and, most grandiosely, the Trans-Iranian railway. Its concerns regarding the rural areas were largely focused on the establishment of security and the enforcement of political compliance. The landowning classes, however, had become, since the previous century, increasingly preoccupied with the need to clarify and consolidate their rights over their property, especially their landed property. During the 1920s and 1930s this older landed elite was reinforced by groups and individuals associated with the new regime, including the upper echelons of army officers and Riza Shah himself, who rapidly translated their new political power into landed wealth. Together these groups embarked on a process of solidifying and enhancing landlordism throughout Iran. Riza Shah, personally becoming the largest landowner in the country, constructed a regime which was solidly pro-landlord and the Majlis, dominated by landlords, passed legislation consolidating their rights. Since the nineteenth century, an overall trend had emerged towards the clearer recognition of absolute private property in land, a trend which was accompanied by the inexorable commercialization of land.19 These developments were driven by Iran’s increasing involvement with the international economy, the resulting shift to cash crops and the increasing profitability of agriculture. The Constitution of 1906 explicitly recognized the inviolability of private property and, after 1921, the new Pahlavi state passed legislation which deepened and enhanced these processes. Beginning in 1922, and then in a cluster between 1928 and 1932, the Majlis passed laws providing for the legal registration of property and title-deeds while the new Civil Code reinforced concepts and notions of absolute ownership of land. Landlordism also prospered on the basis of other legislation during these years. After 1924 the richer landlords were able to benefit from the sale of state lands, and the abolition of the land tax in 1934, and its replacement by a tax on products of the land, shifted the burden of taxation from the landowner to the peasant.20 In tandem with its overall failure at renovation, the Iranian state had, in the nineteenth century, formulated no land legislation to address the existing chaos in land tenure, despite the example of the Ottoman Empire which had, in 1858, passed a comprehensive Land Law.21 By the early twentieth century, property rights in Iran remained often contingent, unclear, complicated and disputed.22 The establishment and enforcement by the state of new legal concepts governing private property was not a straightforward matter and it appears to have been precisely as a consequence of the regime’s efforts to clarify property rights through legislation that many disputes over land ownership came to a head. The battles over land ownership between the shah himself and members of the old elite have recently received attention,23 but the consequence of the legislation in producing and aggravating conflict between landlords and peasants and between khans and nomads, is less well-known. 145

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Struggles over property rights One of the major issues animating rural activism has been, in all historical circumstances, peasant land-hunger. Since the early Pahlavi years in Iran were a period in which attitudes towards private property, and actual patterns of landownership, were transformed, questions naturally arise concerning the peasantry’s attitude to the land legislation of the time. Indeed, the best documented example that has survived of peasant activism in this period details their rejection of landlord claims of ownership. The nomadic pastoralists too rejected, overtly and sometimes violently, their khans’ assertion of their absolute and personal ownership of tribal pastures. In fact the entire Riza Shah period may be seen as one characterized by struggles over land, sometimes covert and subterranean, sometimes open, struggles into which many disparate and conflicting elements entered, sometimes on their own behalf and sometimes in uneasy alliance. These struggles not only took place within the elite, principally between the shah and other landowners, but also between the elite and various subaltern rural groups, including peasants and pastoral nomads, both sides utilizing a wide range of legal and extra-legal methods: the courts; petitions and appeals to the authorities; collective disobedience; arbitrary state and landlord violence and peasant resistance; and armed nomadic uprising. Rural protest in the early Pahlavi period did not, however, centre only on control and ownership of land. There is evidence also of resistance to the growing financial, military and cultural impositions of the new state from peasants and the semisettled, as well as in the better-known form of armed nomadic rebellion. The land registration legislation was perceived as threatening by both peasants and nomads. Similarly, the new policies of conscription, disarmament and the introduction of state monopolies on cash crops such as opium and tobacco provoked intense hostility among peasants and nomads alike, sometimes separately but occasionally, in defiance of conventions speaking of their essential conflict, in cooperation. Furthermore, although peasant hatred of their landlords may be assumed as elemental, it also appears that the changes of the period resulted in an accelerated development of class consciousness among the tribal nomads. As tribal cohesion disintegrated in face of the assertion of the power of the new state, the vertical ties of patronage linking khan and nomad gave way to a sense of disillusion and betrayal on the part of the nomadic population and occasionally to a sense of real class hatred towards their khans. Finally, as conditions in the countryside deteriorated, the most marginal and pauperized among the rural poor abandoned collective action altogether and increasingly resorted to banditry as an individual or small-scale strategy of avoidance and resistance.

Landlords, tenants and nomads Although ideas of land reform had circulated during the constitutional period, such notions were rejected by the post-1921 regime.24 Indeed, early Pahlavi Iran

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experienced rather the reverse of a land reform, seeing an acceleration of the concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands. The land registration legislation inaugurated a concerted land grab by the elite in general and, most spectacularly, by the shah himself, who possessed sufficient political and military resources to make himself by far the largest individual landowner in the country. Although the shah’s personal mania for land acquisition was often at the expense of individual elite families, his regime was clearly a landlord regime and both landlordism and the landowning class as a whole emerged from these years with their position strengthened and placed on solid legal foundations. In general, the changes which enhanced the position of the landlords were, directly or indirectly, at the expense of the peasants and pastoralists and their assertion of their new rights had a deep impact on the relations of landlords with their peasants and of khans with their nomadic followers. Although superficially appearing only to confirm and legalize existing arrangements, in fact the legislation allowed landlords to establish outright and absolute ownership, where previously ownership had been vague, contingent and theoretically temporary, of landed estates to which their title was doubtful or even non-existent. The rich and influential were successful in registering land in their own names even where the peasants claimed to have titles to the land in question, and in converting possession acquired by force into an absolute title,25 the rural poor, whether settled cultivators, semi-nomadic or nomadic pastoralists, losing whatever customary rights they may have believed themselves to have possessed in relation to the land they worked. The peasantry also appears to have lost a variety of broader customary rights, for example, concerning remission of obligation to the landowner in times of natural disaster. The consolidation and enhancement of landlordism under Riza Shah was not, however, accomplished without a struggle and these years provide examples, fragmentary but tantalizing, of resistance from both the settled and the nomadic rural poor. Of course the evidence for peasant activism is sparse and regionally uneven. Such data as exists is largely drawn from British diplomatic archives and reflects the British interest in southern Iran.26 However it is likely that neither the sparseness of the evidence nor its regional concentration reflects the true incidence of peasant activism but rather the particular character of the available source material. That the only trace of a movement as extensive and of such duration as that among the settled Bakhtiyari of Chahar Mahal may now be found in a single report by a British consul and a brief Persian account indicates that the absence of sources does not necessarily indicate an absence of movements.27 Nonetheless on the basis of such fragmentary evidence as has been located to date, it is possible to begin to reconstruct an account of a case of a peasant resistance movement of considerable local significance which was able to maintain itself over a period of several years. It is reasonable to assume that the reactions of the Bakhtiyari peasants were not unique. Although their movement is the only well-documented and sustained one to have come to light so far, it has a parallel in a similar episode

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which occurred in the southern province of Kirman at around the same time, and of which traces may be found in the diaries of the British consul.28 The only sustained peasant movement of the Riza Shah period of which a picture of any detail exists is that which arose in the mid-1920s among the settled peasantry of Chahar Mahal, a rich agricultural region on the fringes of the Bakhtiyari summer pastures.29 The peasants were themselves of Bakhtiyari origin, and their landlords were the great khans of the Bakhtiyari confederation. A process of sedentarization had been underway since the late nineteenth century among pastoral nomads throughout Iran, including the Bakhtiyari, and these recently settled clans, although they had given up their nomadic way of life, still retained their tribal networks. Such tribal settlements seem to have possessed a readier solidarity than non-tribal peasant communities, and this may have facilitated a higher level of communal action. In fact most of the extant examples of peasant resistance from this period, including that of the settled Khamsah in 1929 and the semi-settled Surkhi between 1926 and 1929, as well as the Bakhtiyari, arose from such communities of tribally organized cultivators. It may be that such recently settled tribal societies remained attached to the older communal traditions typical of nomadic pastoralism, and brought with them to their settlements an idealized memory of more democratic tribal customs. They may have been less accustomed to the relations prevailing between landlord and peasant, typically harsher and more distant than those between khan and nomad, and less inclined to tolerate the assertion of private property over communal ownership. Indeed the very strength of existing horizontal ties and communal solidarity, persisting in changing conditions, seems to have encouraged collective action and an anti-landlord consciousness, and even to have grown in importance as the social and economic distance between themselves and their khan-landlords increased.

The Chahar Mahal movement Open discontent and anti-landlord action began among the Bakhtiyari peasantry in one or two villages in Chahar Mahal in 1924. In 1928 it became an open revolt when the peasants in a large number of the khans’ villages rejected the khans’ authority, claimed that the land and the water belonged to God, and that the produce of the land belonged to those who worked the land, namely, themselves.30 They refused to pay anything to the khans or to give them the share of the produce customarily due to them. As the action spread, a committee of peasants was formed which began to direct the movement. This committee adopted a programme of a rather radical complexion31 and from this point on the peasants began to demonstrate an openly hostile attitude towards their landlords, the Bakhtiyari khans. Nonetheless the movement remained peaceful and defensive, only threatening violence when it was itself threatened. The peasant committee was composed chiefly of ex-servants of the khans, who had been dismissed by the khans for various reasons in the past and who had visited Isfahan and Tehran and ‘imbibed new ideas of freedom and equality, which 148

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they proceeded to impart to the villagers’.32 The committee was particularly active in helping the peasants launch actions against the khans in the newly established adliyyah (secular) courts.33 At this stage the peasant movement appears to have been deriving some impetus from its receipt of definite official encouragement, this encouragement being offered in the context of the political struggle then going on between the khans and the government. The khans in fact had the unusual experience of finding themselves, temporarily at least, powerless against their peasants, who received a consistently sympathetic hearing from the authorities. During the early summer of 1928 some members of the committee went to Tehran and were actually received by the prime minister. At this point, however, the government, reflecting on the possible implications of its stance, began to retreat and sent a commission to Chahar Mahal to investigate the conflict. This commission examined the peasants’ grievances and the khans’ title to the land in dispute, and in July submitted their report which, in regard to almost all the villages, was in favour of the khans. The peasants nevertheless refused to accept the decisions of the commission, with the result that Tehran replaced the civil governor of Chahar Mahal with a military officer, who was authorized to use force if necessary to oblige the peasants to abide by the decisions of the commission and to pay the landlords what they claimed. The military governor was determined to carry out his instructions, and with his help the khans again began to receive from their peasants the payments in kind and cash to which they believed themselves entitled as landowners.34 Although the government had initially supported the peasants as a tactic to weaken the Bakhtiyari khans, an awareness appears quickly to have spread through the landowning elite at large and to Riza Shah himself of the danger of any permanent peasant success against the khans, especially in stimulating peasants elsewhere to try to emulate their actions. It was probably only this danger that induced the shah finally to uphold the khans’ rights as landowners. The context for the emergence of a peasant movement on this scale, one which was able to leave an archival record, was provided by the ongoing struggle between the Bakhtiyari khans, the landowners in this case, and the new state.35 This conflict within the elite, and particularly the encouragement which the state initially gave to the peasants against the khans, opened up a gap which allowed the movement to grow and take shape. Briefly flourishing before the shah took fright at its implications, this movement allows a glimpse of what was perhaps the real attitude commonly held by peasants towards their landlords, an attitude typically concealed by the customary deference imposed by their usual powerlessness. It may be argued that the Chahar Mahal movement was simply another chapter in an endemic struggle between sharecroppers and landowners over their respective shares of the crop, perhaps representing an assertion, in a favourable political conjuncture, of persistent subaltern notions of legitimacy and rights. It appears that such struggles had been intensifying since the late nineteenth century, in tandem with the growing commercialization and profitability of agriculture, with landlords exerting growing pressure on their peasants in the effort to extract 149

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a greater surplus in the form of an increased share of the crop. It may also be argued, however, that this movement demonstrated certain novel features stimulated by the rapidly growing salience of modern concepts of private property in land. The Chahar Mahal movement did not express itself in modern ideological terms. Its categorical rejection of the landlord’s claim to a share of the produce of the peasants’ labour is striking but this rejection was neither random nor arbitrary but rather appears to have been based on the peasants’ interpretation of their rights under customary sharecropping contracts. Typically such contracts took notional account of five elements in dividing the crop: land, water, draught animals, seed and labour. The produce, at least in theory, was divided according to one share per provider of each element.36 Themselves providing the animals, seed and labour, the peasants refused to accept the landlord as provider of the remaining two, land and water, preferring to view these as bestowed by God, and therefore denied the landlord any share of the crop. This may well have been a view about legitimate claims traditionally held by sharecropping peasants which they had previously never possessed the power to articulate, or it may have been a new interpretation, provoked by the novel and menacing assertion, by landowners and the state, of their own absolute rights to private property. Although the Chahar Mahal movement may have begun as simply a routine struggle between landlords and sharecroppers, yet the coincidence of the spread and radicalization of this movement in 1928, exactly as the new land legislation was passed by the Majlis, is striking. Although the movement among the Bakhtiyari peasants of Chahar Mahal was the most prolonged and well organized of the period, it was neither isolated nor unique. Coterminous with the beginning of the Chahar Mahal movement a similar, though more obscure struggle broke out between sharecroppers and landlords in the southern province of Kirman.37 In Kirman town the peasants had established a council of their own called the anjuman-i ranjbar (council of toilers).38 As in the case of the agreements in Chahar Mahal, so, according to the practice in force at Kirman, the produce was divided between landowner and peasant according to a fixed division. A peasant who worked on land owned by a landlord received 30 per cent of the produce for himself in exchange for the labour and animals necessary for cultivation while the remaining 70 per cent went to the landowner who provided seed and water and claimed ownership of the land From the beginning of the cultivation year, 21 September 1924, the sharecroppers represented in the anjuman-i ranjbar made a concerted attempt to increase the share of the crop they were able to retain. In this case, however, the political context was different and the option of exploiting local power struggles was not available. The peasants’ effort failed, their movement collapsed and they were obliged to resume working according to the old agreements. Nonetheless their agitation galvanized another dimension of rural conflict. A rural stratum even lower and more impoverished than the peasants, the khushnishin, agricultural labourers who lacked the sharecroppers’ cultivation rights and who were

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employed casually and seasonally by them, appear to have been stimulated to make demands for higher wages, in cash and kind, and refused to work for the peasants when their demands were rejected.39

Rural ideology and consciousness During the 1920s the world of the rural poor was being profoundly shaken both by the rapid political and economic changes of the period and by the ideological innovations which accompanied them. The isolation of the rural areas was breaking down, new ideas were circulating more widely and reaching even small provincial towns and villages, and penetrating ever more subaltern social levels. Broad economic forces were beginning to transform the position of the peasantry and, together with the new policies of the regime such as military and labour conscription, were leading to much greater contact between the countryside and the town. The commercialization of land continued apace, further worsening the condition of the small peasantry who increasingly lost, through apparently impersonal economic forces, any small parcels of land they may have actually owned, reducing them to struggling for sharecropping rights or even to complete landlessness. The sharecropping peasant was also deeply affected by the dramatic shift taking place towards the production for export of cash crops such as opium, cotton, tobacco and silk, and the development of market and monetary relationships in the countryside, and their own frequent transformation into wage-labourers. In some parts of the country, direct monetary exchange between merchants and peasants was becoming common, and there was an increase in pre-harvest sales of crops, whereby merchants made cash advances to producers. All these developments were invariably accompanied by a rise in rural indebtedness, increasing stratification within rural communities and a growth in landlessness and immiserization. These processes, however, were uneven and traditional subsistence share-cropping, with payment in kind, persisted alongside the intrusion of the market economy.40 In general, however, rural areas were being drawn inexorably into the political, economic and ideological orbit of the provincial urban centres. An especially significant development was the growing pattern of labour migration, especially in the inter-war decades, for southern Iran. The developing crisis in the countryside, among the peasantry but in a sharper form among the pastoral nomads, producing the beginning of a flight from the land, encouraged where employment could be found in the new industrial enterprises, particularly the oil fields and the Trans-Iranian railway. In the midst of these upheavals, the rural poor were increasingly exposed to new ideas. Frequently these new ideas emanated from the modern state itself and from elements among the nationalist elite. The land legislation of the 1920s and early 1930s was accompanied by rapid and profound changes in ideas about the nature of ownership and the rights attached to private property. Not only the landed elite, but the peasantry too seems to have been affected by these new ideas

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and to have been stimulated to consider and perhaps reassess their own position. As well as promoting sharpened concepts of private property, these years also saw the greater diffusion of discussions, which had begun during the constitutional period, about the beneficial effects of ameliorating the lot of the peasantry and of land reform. One striking example of the widening circulation of such ideas, again drawn from the Bakhtiyari, comes with the appearance of the Sitarah-i Bakhtiyari (the Bakhtiyari Star), an organization established at the beginning of the 1920s by the younger generation of khans.41 The Sitarah-i Bakhtiyari formulated a comprehensive programme of political and social change, including proposals about land reform and the welfare and rights of peasants and workers, published the programme in pamphlet form and distributed it openly.42 These ideas had their immediate source among elite reforming circles in Isfahan and Tehran, and their origins in the ideas of the old Democrat Party. By the 1920s such ideas were reaching wider, non-elite circles through a number of channels. They reached the Bakhtiyari sharecroppers and nomads as a result of direct transmission by dissident members of the tribal elite, the junior khans. Another important route for the diffusion of new ideas was the growing contact between villages and towns. There had always been some degree of contact between all but the most remote villages and provincial towns and between nomads and urban marketplaces. Now, however, not only was the level of contact increasing and changing, but the small market towns and provincial cities were themselves undergoing a transformation. Easier and quicker communications and travel within the provinces, between provincial capitals like Isfahan and Shiraz and Tehran, and even with the world beyond Iran, reproduced in provincial life and at deeper subaltern levels, the intellectual ferment which had gripped the elite intelligentsia since the constitutional period. In the context of this growing national integration, the national and provincial press were of particular significance for the spread of new ideas, at least until the mid-1920s when harsher censorship began to take effect. By the early 1920s, the press was playing a role of central importance in shaping an emergent public opinion and in giving expression to popular political attitudes. The circulation of press reports and opinions was not, of course, limited to those able to read and with the means to purchase a newspaper. Free reading rooms had been established in many provincial cities and newspapers were often distributed free, even among the tribespeople.43 Articles might be read aloud in bazars and marketplaces for the benefit of the illiterate, providing a focus for popular discussions. Peasants and nomads coming to town to sell produce, to buy commodities, or for any other social or religious purpose, would thus be readily exposed to the contents of the newspapers and able to transmit by word of mouth their contents, or versions thereof, further throughout the rural areas, the tradition of oral communication through extended family and tribal networks still remaining strong. An even more significant medium for the poorer classes were the anonymous broadsheets (shabnamahs, literally night-letters) which frequently appeared posted on city walls or circulated in bazars. These publications, freed by their anonymity from 152

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legal constraints or the fear of retribution, articulated directly and sometimes menacingly the grievances and demands of the oppressed. The expression of both specific and general threats was a noteworthy feature of a typical shabnamah.44 Both the ‘respectable’ press and the shabnamahs shaped and expressed, in different ways and to different degrees, the attitudes of the poor. A further potent ingredient contributing to the emerging subaltern discourse was the prevalence of rumour. Although often distorted and even fantastical, rumours often expressed in a distilled and essential way the concerns of the powerless, and had, furthermore, the capacity to spread like wildfire, often being instrumental in sparking off local protests, both in the towns and in the countryside.45 The impact of the increased contact between the urban and rural areas can be seen clearly in the case of the Bakhtiyari peasants of Chahar Mahal. Although they expressed their opposition to their landlords by reference to an apparently traditional worldview, yet their movement, and especially its leadership, actually derived a great deal of its impetus from the changing political context, from the availability of greater personal independence and mobility and from improved access to a range of radical ideas circulating in southern Iran in these years. This is strikingly illustrated by the role played by the ex-servants of the khans, who formed the committee which provided leadership for the movement and formulated a programme. These individuals constituted a factor which was of crucial importance in the emergence of this movement. Having visited the cities of Isfahan and Tehran, they provided a conduit through which new ideas were able to reach the peasants in the villages and they had acquainted themselves sufficiently with the institutions of the new state to help the peasants in taking their cases to the adliyyah courts.

Migration and proletarianization Another key influence on the rural poor of southern Iran, both the nomadic pastoralists and the settled peasantry, was labour migration, and especially their increasing proletarianization in relatively large numbers in the oil industry. The hired, unskilled labour in the oil industry in the south, a nascent ‘Iranian proletariat’, was mainly drawn from the pauperized and landless rural poor, both peasants and nomads.46 Other, urban, sources, which have typically provided recruits for newly developing industries, such as artisans in the collapsing handicrafts industry and the mass of the city poor, seem to have contributed very little to the development of this working class. A crucial characteristic of these new workers in the southern oil fields was that a majority preserved their ties with their village or their tribe, where their families remained and continued to engage in agriculture or pastoralism. The southern oil industry was a major crucible for the formation of an indigenous Iranian working class. In 1925 Iran possessed fewer than twenty modern industrial plants, of which only five employed more than fifty workers.47 The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, however, employed large and growing numbers of labourers, 153

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who worked collectively in modern industrial conditions. In 1919, the Company employed nearly 4,000 Iranian workers. By the next year, this had doubled to nearly 8,500, and by 1922 had reached 18,500.48 The 1920s saw an acceleration of the process by which the rural poor in southern Iran began to be transformed from pastoralists and agricultural cultivators, dominated by their khans and landlords, into wage-labourers in the industrial conditions of the oil-fields, semi-organized into unions and exposed to modern political ideas. The labour migration to the oil-fields may be identified as a specific factor of crucial significance in the transmission of radical ideologies to both the rural and urban lower classes of the south. The Bakhtiyari, settled and nomadic, appear to have been affected particularly intensely by this process. The number of Bakhtiyari employed in the oil fields was particularly large. According to the Oil Company itself, by the 1920s most of its labourers were Bakhtiyaris.49 The new confidence of the former nomads and peasants, now transformed into industrial workers employed directly by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and freed from dependence on the patronage of their khans or the power of their landlords, had its effect on hierarchical relationships within the Bakhtiyari confederation and across southern Iran in general, and specifically on the stimulation of class antagonisms. New ideas of equality and political emancipation emanating from the emigrants to the oil-fields appear to have provided an impetus both for the development and rapid spread of the anti-landlord movement among the Bakhtiyari peasants and for the crystallization of an emerging, albeit still unsophisticated, class consciousness among the nomads. There are clear comparisons between the processes at work in southern Iran in the 1920s and those operative in Azarbayjan two decades earlier when large numbers of impoverished peasants migrated to Baku to become workers in the oil fields.50 Many of these Azarbayjani migrants maintained continuous contacts with their own communities in Iran and these peasants-turned-workers became typical transmitters of urban unrest and political ideas,51 playing a pivotal role in the introduction of social-democratic ideas into northern Iran, their influence traceable to the small towns and even the villages.52

Pastoral nomads against khans The existence of a substantial measure of hostility and resentment on the part of peasants towards their landlords may be assumed as a given, whatever the degree of its concealment and submergence beneath a customary and politic deference. In the case of the attitude of the nomads towards their khans, however, a view has tended to prevail which has emphasized the pre-eminence of vertical ties, binding subordinate layers to the tribal leadership through a hierarchical arrangement of patronage and dependence, characterized by mutual, though unequal, responsibilities and obligations. For much of the tribal population in the 1920s, however, such a description of the khan–nomad relationship seems to have constituted an

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idealized norm or an historical myth, against which the reality was increasingly found to be lacking. Again the contours of these resentments may be traced particularly clearly in the case of the Bakhtiyari, although similar processes producing a similar disillusionment may be discerned among a wide range of tribal groups throughout Iran. By the early 1920s the hostility felt by the Bakhtiyari tribal rank and file towards the great khans of the confederation was both increasing and increasingly openly expressed. The migratory Bakhtiyari, like their settled kin among the sharecroppers of Chahar Mahal, manifested a vivid resentment at the actions and behaviour of their khans. Since the late nineteenth century, the khans’ wealth and power had grown exponentially as a result of their links to the British diplomatic establishment, their participation in the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and their presence within the central government at Tehran.53 The gulf which had opened up between the khans and their nomadic followers, and the distance separating them, in cultural, political, economic and even purely geographical terms had continued to widen. The nomads keenly resented all these developments. Like the Bakhtiyari peasants, they formulated their grievances in terms of an older, idealized version of rights and legitimacy. They repeatedly complained of the injustice of the senior khans. They felt cheated by the growing disparity between themselves and their khans, who now lived in grand houses, sent their children to Europe and governed provinces; they considered the reciprocal basis of tribal life to have been violated. They had long ago abandoned any qualms they might once have had about openly criticizing and denouncing the khans, and made persistent efforts, albeit tentative and inchoate, to have themselves recognized, particularly by the British, as a factor in Bakhtiyari, and to make their voices heard when the British negotiated with the khans.54 By the early 1920s, the Bakhtiyari nomads’ feelings of resentment and injustice were being sharpened by the interrelated issues of land ownership and the khans’ monopoly of dealings with the Oil Company. The changes taking place as a result of the land legislation were again, as with the peasants, a crucial issue. Throughout Iran the tribal khans and aghas, no less than other members of the elite, exploited the new legislation to register as their personal private property land which had hitherto been treated as a collective tribal resource. In the case of the Bakhtiyari, the resentments thus generated were aggravated to an acute degree by the opportunities for quick profits offered to the khans by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s need to buy and rent land for its drilling operations. The senior khans’ arrogation to themselves of the full ownership of tribal lands caused outrage within the confederation. The nomads followed with great attention the course of the khans’ dispute with the Chahar Mahal peasants, and anger at their own dispossession by the senior khans contributed materially to the outbreak of tribal rebellion in 1929.

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The 1929 tribal rebellion In 1928 the movement among the Bakhtiyari sharecroppers of Chahar Mahal was finally suppressed. The following year, however, saw southern Iran convulsed by a series of peasant and nomad uprisings in what became the most serious rural crisis faced by the regime in the two decades of its existence. Even in the late 1920s, after several years of attempted disarmament, the nomads still retained an option that the peasantry did not possess, that of armed rebellion. Yet, although the uprisings of 1929 in the south were indeed largely predicated upon the involvement of the armed and mobile nomadic populations, in certain areas, notably Kirman province, they also provided the context for renewed manifestations of peasant resistance. In the spring of 1929, following prolonged episodes of urban protest in a series of provincial towns, a succession of nomadic and peasant revolts broke out.55 One by one, the rural areas of western, southern, south-central and southeastern Iran erupted into rebellion. The most prolonged and serious of these rebellions were those in Fars, Kirman and Isfahan, among the confederations of the Qashqai, the Khamsah and the Bakhtiyari, and at their height, over the summer months, much of rural southern Iran slipped out of government control altogether. The epicentre of the southern tribal uprisings was located in the province of Fars.56 In the spring of 1929 first the Qashqai and then the Khamsah rose against the central government. Some of the smaller tribal groups of the province, especially the Kuhgiluyyah, as well as independent brigand chiefs and their bands joined in the movement, and the whole of Fars quickly became engulfed in conflict.57 At the beginning of June the movement spread northwards, to the province of Isfahan, where sections of the Bakhtiyari also broke out into rebellion.58 Although each of these tribal groups had its own specific concerns, they shared certain major underlying grievances with each other and with the settled peasants. They were angry at the new state’s far-reaching fiscal and military impositions and alienated by its cultural policies, they resented the land legislation, and, in many cases, they were also ready to grasp an opportunity to rid themselves of their own tribal/landlord aristocracies. Yet the context of the 1929 crisis was not one of an eternal conflict between tribal chaos and state-imposed order. Tribal rebellions, in this and other periods of Iranian history, have often been seen as simple efforts to resist the imposition of the control and authority of the central state. The 1929 risings, however, were not manifestations of an unchanging hostility on the part of nomads towards central government. On the contrary, during the 1920s both the khans and the nomadic rank-and-file, the latter especially weary of the hardship caused by the anarchy of the previous two decades, had evinced a willingness to embrace the opportunity for security and peaceful change offered by the establishment of a strong central government. Indeed the nomads seemed eager to grasp the opportunity, offered by the extension of Tehran’s authority, to rid themselves completely of their great khans. Rather than expressing their dissatisfaction with their leaders simply by shifting allegiance from one khan to another, as in the past,

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the nomads now, with the encouragement of the new state and nationalist opinion, began to reject altogether the rule of the khans. Far from being hostile to the extension of the new state, during most of the 1920s the great tribal confederations had been inclined to welcome the gradual establishment of greater stability. This changed, however, after 1927–1928, when the regime launched a radical programme of modernization and centralization. Unlike the intra-elite political and constitutional struggles of the earlier years, these measures, including conscription, dress laws, nomadic settlement, land registration and the establishment of government monopolies on opium and tobacco, represented a direct social and economic assault on the rural poor, both settled and nomadic. The rural risings of 1929 were provoked by the sudden introduction of these radical measures, and were directed both at resisting the measures themselves and at removing those deemed responsible for them. The risings were nowhere led by the most senior tribal khans, now linked to and dependent upon Riza Shah and the new state, but by junior, subordinate and minor khans and kalantars.59 The risings were often, indeed, directed at least as much against their own khan/landlord aristocracies, seen as beneficiaries of the new order, as against the state. There was some degree of coordination between the Bakhtiyari and the Qashqai tribes, and both groups, and the Khamsah, put forward similar demands: that the conscription and the dress laws not be applied to them, and for the abolition of the Census Department, the Department for the Registration of Title Deeds and the government monopolies.60 These demands were defensive, aimed at protecting the tribes from the novel impositions of the government which were popularly perceived as unjust. The tribes explained their resistance in terms of their desire for fair treatment and for a cessation of the violations of their rights. They strongly rejected the notion of themselves as rebels against duly constituted authority, seeing themselves, on the contrary, as the victims of illegitimate oppression. Their outlook found typical expression in a petition which a group of Qashqai kalantars arranged to be handed in to the British consulate in Shiraz on 7 June. In their petition the kalantars stressed their loyalty to the government and their past readiness to assist the army in its campaigns and specifically singled out the oppressiveness and greed of the military governors as the cause of their discontent. They complained that they had been asking for justice for three months but had been ignored. Although the main body of their petition was conventional enough, the kalantars concluded with a request of unusual ideological audacity. In a vivid illustration of the speed at which their world was opening up, they requested that the British consul communicate their petition to the League of Nations.61 Even General Shaybani, charged by the shah with the restoration of order in the south, seemed, in the wording of his offer of amnesty and pardon, to accept that the kalantars and the tribespeople had certain legitimate grievances and acknowledged their appeal for justice.62 By the late summer-autumn of 1929, the rural uprisings in the south had largely exhausted themselves, and the government, through a combination of military 157

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force and broad but temporary concession and compromise, was beginning to re-establish its authority.63 These uprisings in fact constituted the last significant collective rural opposition of the Riza Shah period, their failure to delay, divert or moderate the regime’s determination to impose its agenda ushering in a decade of extreme hardship throughout the countryside. The rural poor, both peasants and pastoralists, found themselves disarmed, heavily taxed in order to provide revenue for the regime’s prestige projects, the Trans-Iranian Railway and the army, and increasingly vulnerable to labour and military conscription. Nonetheless, during the 1930s the rural poor, although avoiding confrontation with the authorities, continued to employ a range of strategies in efforts to ameliorate their circumstances.

Banditry as resistance One major rural strategy of survival and resistance adopted by the rural, especially the nomadic, poor was banditry. By the 1920s, banditry in Iran was generally perceived as a survival from the past, from a period characterized by the weakness and disintegration of state authority, the backwardness and isolation of the countryside, and the uncontrolled power of the tribal khans and their armed followers. According to this view, with modernization and national integration, banditry, already an anachronism, would easily be suppressed. In fact, however, the Riza Shah decades saw not the gradual disappearance of banditry, but rather a change in its character. The successful advance of the new state in the first half of the 1920s did indeed produce a decline in rural disorder of all kinds. But from mid-decade on, especially in the face of the worsening conditions in the countryside from the late 1920s, banditry underwent a widespread recrudescence. The rural pauperization resulting from the regime’s development policies, the disruption and disintegration of tribal organization by state centralization, the fear of the new military authorities placed over the tribes, and enforced settlement and the collapse of the pastoral economy, all tended to force the fringes of tribal society into permanent banditry. Despite the preoccupation of the authorities with security and control in the countryside, banditry persisted throughout the 1930s, constituting a strategy whereby pauperized rural, especially nomadic, elements, sometimes allied to other marginal figures such as army deserters, continued to evade and defy the new state. Such banditry was neither a survival from the pre-modern era nor an anachronism, but was rather itself created by, and constituted a response to, conditions of rapid and authoritarian modernization and rural social disintegration. Such banditry was quite distinct from the customs of raiding and sheep-lifting, customarily limited and contained and endemic to pastoral environments. It signified, rather, the consolidation of relatively stable and permanent bandit groups, deemed outlaws by the authorities, divorced from their tribal contexts and hierarchies but remaining in varying degrees of contact with local populations. This contact might be very close and supportive, especially where ties of kin existed, 158

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but might also be deeply antagonistic and exploitative. Both settled and nomadic communities often gave succour to bandits, but where succour was refused, the bandits’ treatment of ‘hostile’ villages might be extremely brutal. Everywhere, however, the popular discourse contrasted the power of the bandit with the weakness and cowardice of the gendarmerie, probably reflecting the resentment of the rural poor at the corruption and oppressiveness of the authorities.64 The re-emergence of banditry as a consequence of tighter state control and the regime’s political and economic policies may be seen in the case of the Qashqai tribes. In 1925, the Qashqai had apparently welcomed the removal of their ilkhani and had anticipated a period of increased order and security. However, they found that the establishment of direct military control produced no improvement in their conditions. On the contrary, the simultaneous arrival of a rapacious and corrupt military governor and the insatiable officials of the Finance Department who now everywhere accompanied the army, became a turning point in the pacification of Fars. Within a year conditions in Fars had begun to deteriorate rapidly. The imposition of the new financial and military order began to lead to a disintegration of tribal cohesion and the appearance of banditry among pauperized and marginalized tribal groups. Numbers of tents deserted their tribal units, families hiding themselves in various parts of the province, more or less as outlaws.65 A significant feature of the rural crises of 1929 was the extent and character of the participation of substantial groups of bandits. Even before these risings in southern Iran, the social, political and economic chaos produced by the regime’s authoritarian version of modernity in the rural areas, among pastoralists and cultivators alike, had already led to a retreat by fringes of these societies into permanent brigandry. One example of these processes is provided by Mahdi Surkhi, who headed what became a substantial group of bandits. Mahdi Surkhi was a small landowner and khan of the Surkhi, a small tribe, allied but not actually belonging to the Qashqai, semi-sedentarized and heavily engaged in opium cultivation. With the generalized reappearance of banditry in the mid-1920s as a strategy of rural resistance, Mahdi was driven into becoming an outlaw by the injustice of the local authorities who, having already imprisoned him for some misdemeanours of his tribe, then also allowed his tents to be plundered. From 1926 onwards, Mahdi collected around him numbers of the disaffected, both Surkhis and from many of the smaller Qashqai clans.66 The imposition of the opium monopoly in 1928 turned Mahdi from an outlaw into the leader of a peasant movement, as widespread resistance to the monopoly broke out among the settled cultivators across Fars, and he and his tribe actively involved themselves in the Qashqai rebellion.67 Again the Bakhtiyari rebellion clearly shows the links between the peasant cultivators, the nomadic tribes and the fringes of bandits. For example, in July 1929 the leader, named Khaybar, of one of the largest brigand bands, together with 200 Bakhtiyari, captured the village of Taghun, on the Isfahan–Shiraz road. He then broke open the government opium store, took out the government percentage of 10 per cent, and returned the remainder to the peasants, taking receipts.68 This type of rather sophisticated subversion of 159

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the new state opium monopoly had also been widely in evidence during the Khamsah insurgency. In pre-modern Iran, banditry had possessed a symbiotic relationship with such rudimentary forces of law and order as existed on a local level. Amniyyah (rural gendarmerie) or road-guards, for example, employed by local governors or tribal khans, and recruited from among the nomads, might often moonlight as the very bandits they were supposed to apprehend, and governors might be in league with bandits, whose plunder they would share. With the arrival of modernity and the new state in the 1920s, however, this relationship, and the social framework which supported it, collapsed. The consolidation of a state bureaucracy and the establishment of a modern army, with officials and officers arriving in provincial postings from far afield and without local connections, and the introduction of defined and fixed legal codes, meant an end to the easy permeability of the border between the forces of law and the outlaw. The introduction of conscription in 1925, and its inexorable enforcement throughout the countryside, added a new character to the panoply of rural outlaws, that of the army deserter. Although familiar from Ottoman history, the deserter, a quintessentially modern figure quite distinct from the local off-duty road-guard, was not a traditional feature of Iranian banditry, owing to the absence of forced enlistment and a regular army. Yet, by the late 1920s the fugitive from the army, with some military experience, had become a specific and serious threat to rural security. Examples include the ex-gendarme Sayyid Farhad, active in Kashan in the late 1920s, and the army deserter Colonel Gigu. The case of Gigu is particularly interesting. An Armenian, Gigu held a command in the Armenian squadron, a self-contained unit within the new army, composed exclusively at all levels of Armenians. This squadron was one of the crack units of the new army and saw a great deal of active service. It was particularly important in the pacification campaigns in Luristan, where it acquired a reputation for brutality. Gigu was a close associate of the senior military commander in the area, General Amirahmadi, and fell victim to a plot hatched by Amirahmadi’s enemies. He was accused of trying to smuggle opium and sentenced to imprisonment but deserted. He thereupon became leader of a group of bandits which began to operate in tandem with the tribal rebels among the Lur nomads whom he had formerly been charged with suppressing. The bandit has often been depicted, both in popular discourse and in scholarship, as a representative and a champion of the rural oppressed.69 Certainly banditry of the types described above constituted a strategy of rural survival and occasionally resistance, but it was essentially defensive, manifesting little overt political direction. The phenomenon of ‘social banditry’, of banditry articulating a programme of political and social reform, is much more rare in Iran.70 Social banditry has been particularly associated with areas which possessed a strong tradition of peasant rebellion. Although Iran has in general lacked such rebellions, they have been found to some extent in the Caspian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran, and here they indeed produced repeated instances of social banditry in the 1920s.71 160

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In 1922, for example, two former followers of Kuchik Khan’s Jangali movement, Sayyid Jalal and Karbalai Ibrahim, separately became active as bandit-rebels in the Jangal of Gilan.72 Each collected small numbers of adherents and appear to have attempted to resurrect the Jangali movement among the local peasantry. Karbalai Ibrahim’s band reached about 300 and they managed to take control of Kasma, Kuchik Khan’s former base, and two neighbouring villages before the band was suppressed by the army and Karbalai Ibrahim publicly hanged in Rasht. Sayyid Jalal also collected about 200 armed men, including some deserters from the army, and began establishing his control over Gilani villages. Many villagers began to offer him their support as a result of the reprisals on non-combatants to which the army frequently resorted. Within a few months, however, Sayyid Jalal too was captured and executed. In 1925 another bandit-rebel, Haydar Khan, emerged in Gilan, and by 1926 several bands of brigands were active in the Jangal. One of these bands was led by an officer-deserter from the army, Ibrahim Khan, and contained a number of officer and soldier deserters. Ibrahim Khan had ambitions of becoming a second Kuchik Khan, and issued orders to villages in the area in which he was operating that taxes were to be paid to him, claiming in a manifesto that his organization was directed against those traitors who were assisting the British to gain control of Iran. However his band was suppressed by the army in October. During the 1930s banditry continued to threaten rural security, tribal fragments being driven to this resort by political oppression, social disintegration and economic hardship. In the 1930s banditry itself underwent a mutation into smuggling which developed on a massive scale in response to the new state monopolies on foreign trade and on cash crops such as opium and tobacco, and especially the massive domestic taxes, about 600 per cent ad valorem, imposed on staples such as tea and sugar. The prevalence of smuggling and the seriousness with which it was viewed by the state is demonstrated by the draconian penalties which were introduced in the 1930s, including long terms of imprisonment, the death penalty and the use of military courts.73 As with banditry, smuggling depended on and flourished with the support of local communities. In the summer of 1935, for example, the government decided to crack down on the immense amount of smuggling which was going on in Kirmanshah. After the arrest of one of the biggest local smugglers, some fifty local traders were also arrested on charges of complicity. By the end of the investigation, the chief of police, the governor and the commander of the garrison were all implicated.74

Law and petitions as resistance The rural poor also continued to try to exploit such opportunities as they were able to find to persuade and put pressure on the authorities. One strategy involved the use of the new modern courts of law. The Chahar Mahal peasant movement had displayed both a readiness and an ability to take its grievances against the landlords to the new adliyyah courts. Little is known about the extent and scope 161

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of peasant efforts to use the courts in this way, and it is certainly correct that the peasant had in practice ‘less easy access to the courts and less ability to put his case’ than had the landowners.75 Nonetheless there is fragmentary evidence to suggest that the peasant resort to this option may have been more common than is usually supposed.76 Peasants and tribespeople also continued to make extensive use of a strategy common to urban protests: the presentation of petitions outlining their grievances and asking for redress to powerful figures and institutions, especially the Majlis and the shah. These petitions suggest a strong sense on the part of the rural poor of natural justice, of the recognition of conditions for the exercise of legitimate authority and of their own rights. Such petitions habitually couched their appeals in the language of legitimacy and justice and protested against their violation by a usurping power. With the regeneration of the institution of the monarchy after 1925–1926, and the decline in significance of the Majis, the shah became increasingly the focus of petitions and appeals. This also reflected a belief widespread among the poorer classes, and even among some of the elite, that the shah was not aware of the true situation of the peasantry but that their suffering was the fault of incompetent or unjust officials. A corollary of this belief was the hope that, if only these injustices might be brought to the notice of the shah, he would ensure that they would be rectified. As a result of these notions, very large numbers of petitions were submitted to the shah. When the shah visited Kirmanshah in 1930, for example, 600 petitions were received asking for his help or for the righting of various wrongs.77 Sometimes, however, in line with an older tradition, petitioners would make desperate efforts to approach the shah in person and appeal to him directly.78 With its radical phase over by the early 1930s, the regime entered a period of demoralization and, with its attention on political security, a strategy of avoidance became possible in the rural areas. Some of the harshest effects of the policy of nomadic settlement, in particular, were mitigated by the extensive use of bribery. During 1936–1937, for example, the governor-general of Fars, Abulfath Dawlatshahi, in collusion with the local senior military commander, General Zandiyyah, took 700 riyals per family from the nomads of Fars, who were then allowed to migrate as usual, while reports were sent to Tehran that they had all been settled in houses. Both were dismissed and arrested. Following this, in September 1937 three officials responsible for the administration and settlement of the Qashqai and Khamsah tribes in Fars were also dismissed. They had apparently sent reports to Tehran stating that a large number of houses had been built for the tribes. A senior army officer sent from Tehran to inspect the district found that their reports were untrue and that no account could be given of a sum of 1 million riyals which had been allotted to Fars for tribal settlement.79 Nonetheless, where avoidance was impossible, isolated acts of violent resistance also continued to occur. Although by the 1930s the official policy of disarmament had been comprehensively imposed on the Bakhtiyari, many rifles had been 162

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hidden rather than surrendered. In the summer of 1937 news surfaced of an attack by some Bakhtiyari on a party of census officials. The tribesmen beat the officials badly with the big sticks that they had begun to carry since disarmament, and the officials had to be rescued by a detachment of fifty gendarmes. Thereupon the tribesmen appear to have retrieved their rifles and the local village was besieged by the authorities, with Bakhtiyari snipers blocking off all access and the village isolated.80

Conclusion Early Pahlavi Iran has conventionally been seen through the prism of its state-building effort. Attention has been focused almost exclusively on the agenda of the nationalist elite and positive or negative balance-sheets drawn up according to assessments of this elite’s success in transforming Iran into a modern, politically independent, nation state. This widespread acceptance, within Iran and beyond, of a nationalist discourse has obscured both the nature of the impact on the rural poor of the upheavals of the period, and the persistent realities of rural conflict. After 1921, and particularly after the consolidation of the military–monarchical dictatorship in 1926–1927, Riza Shah and his supporters grasped the opportunity to begin the construction of a strong, independent state and introduced, to that end, many of the reforms long advocated by the reforming and constitutionalist intelligentsia. In an ideological context conditioned by a secular nationalism deriving from European models, and within increasingly authoritarian state structures, Riza Shah moved against foreign influence, began to establish Iran as a regional power, and introduced a raft of domestic policies aimed at remodelling Iran along Western lines. Land reform had been one of the measures advocated by constitutionalist opinion, although usually not out of concern for the peasantry but rather as a state-building measure. Although Riza Shah had appropriated in certain respects the agenda of Iranian nationalism and constitutionalism, nonetheless he absolutely rejected the notion of land reform as a crucial element in national progress. In fact his policies were rather the opposite of a land reform, in that they clarified and consolidated the private property rights of landlords and, together with the regime’s general economic policies, led to an ever-greater concentration of ownership.81 Overall, the Riza Shah decades were a period of defeat for the rural poor. Unable to link up with urban opposition, and unable to generate on their own account a political challenge to the regime which transcended their own sectional interests, the settled and nomadic poor bore the full brunt of modernization. The context within which peasants and nomads negotiated their relations with their khans and landlords was directly affected by the property registration legislation; their living standards were driven down by the resulting commercialization of land, which encouraged landowners to extract ever more surplus value from their tenants, 163

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as well as by the general development policies adopted by the regime, and their social and cultural values undermined by the nationalist elite’s reform agenda. The state’s decision to concentrate financial resources on prestige projects such as the Trans-Iranian railway meant a failure to extend services such as health and education into the countryside, peasants and nomads receiving little or nothing in return for their enormously increased taxation. Yet the rural poor were also affected in other, more positive, ways by the changes of the period. The growing national integration increased contact between rural and urban areas, the reach of the press grew, and the ideological context was transformed by both national and international developments. Not only has the impact of the regime’s policies on the countryside been underestimated but it is also equally clear, contrary to the conventions of scholarship, that the rural poor did not remain passive in the face of this onslaught on their standard of living and way of life. Rather than resigning themselves to hardship and oppression, various categories of the rural poor, both settled peasants and nomads, actively devised strategies of resistance. Such strategies were directed against their own khans and landlords and against the new state, and often against the combined power of both the traditional and the new authorities. The activism of the rural poor, however, was often fundamentally defensive, aimed not at transforming material conditions but rather at deflecting change which, owing to the choices of the regime, was perceived as damaging and unjust. The mobilization of the Bakhtiyari sharecroppers in Chahar Mahal, for example, was directed, in the first instance, against their khan landlords, and appears to have been provoked by the novel and aggressive assertion by the khans of their own absolute ownership of the land. However, the khans’ action in making these assertions was a result of the new state’s own legislation, and the example of the shah himself. Although Riza Shah lent the sharecroppers some initial support, albeit temporary and tactical, it was his own policies that were encouraging landlord action, and the sharecroppers’ movement finally found itself confronting both the khans and the state and was eventually suppressed by the army. Although radical in its rejection of the landlords’ authority and claims of ownership, the Chahar Mahal sharecroppers’ movement seems to have been nonetheless essentially defensive. Another, similar, sharecroppers’ movement, in Kirman, also shows that such peasants were as eager to safeguard their own, relatively privileged position, as holders of nasaq rights, against the landless khushnishin, as they were to challenge the landlords. The case of Kirman suggests again that such sharecropper movements tended to be primarily concerned with the protection of their own position, and vulnerable to collapse when confronted with demands for improved conditions from a rural stratum even more impoverished than themselves. Again, the nomadic uprisings also appear to have been primarily defensive, designed to ward off the attentions of the new state, and were directed against the khans insofar as the khans had identified themselves with, and acted as agents of, that state. The nomads typically combined resentment both at the actions of the khans in asserting land rights, and at the new state as the guarantor of those 164

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assertions and as the bearer of wholly new social and economic obligations. Although nowhere led by the senior khans, these uprisings also often indicated a bid for leadership by junior elite elements, either younger khans, in the case of the Bakhtiyari, kalantars in the case of the Qashqai, and middle-ranking leaders of tribal sub-sections in the case of the Khamsah. As with the Chahar Mahal sharecroppers, the nomads too justified their defiance by appeals to natural justice and by demands for the restoration of the status quo ante. The key development in rural Iran during the Riza Shah period was the consolidation and growth of large absentee-owned estates, a trend exemplified by the shah’s own land acquisitions. Reactionary rather than conservative in its impact on the countryside, Riza Shah’s rejection of land reform was heavy with consequences for the future, bequeathing to his son, Muhammad Riza Shah, the tasks of confronting the political power of the class of large landowners and attempting to secure a stable social base for the regime in the countryside. Two decades after his father’s forced abdication, Muhammad Riza Shah, under pressure from the Kennedy administration in Washington, from the revival of domestic political opposition, and from his own desire to destroy the political obstacles represented by the class of big landowners and to acquire support among a grateful peasantry, adopted the idea of land reform. Between 1962 and 1971 a major redistribution of land ownership took place in Iran. The state’s decision to intervene in the structure of land ownership again provoked, as it had in the 1920s, outbreaks of peasant activism, now unleashing a dynamic producing a number of cases of land seizures and eviction of landlords. The land reform, however, failed in its political objective of securing a stable social base in the countryside for the shah’s regime.82 The great estates were broken up and a class of peasant proprietors emerged but more than a million agricultural labourers received no land at all and, of those who received land, over 70 per cent obtained too little for basic subsistence.83 As the power of the monarchy began to crumble in 1978 under the pressure of an urban-based mass protest movement, the villages, especially those in close proximity to towns and cities, became drawn into the revolutionary upheavals. In March 1979, only one month after the revolution itself, peasant and khushnishin groups began a new round of land expropriations and seizures occurred in virtually every major province and in villages and districts throughout the country. The impetus for these expropriations was sometimes provided by outside political activists, sometimes by young village activists politicized by their experiences in urban centres, but the overwhelming majority of participants in seizures and in demands for the distribution of land were landless and land-poor peasants themselves.84 In these revolutionary years, this renewed activism of the rural poor provided an echo of the peasant and nomad movements of the 1920s.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies. Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2005. The author would like to thank the journal editor, Tom Brass, for his comments and for permission to republish.

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2 See, for example, Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, 1998). 3 For a discussion of some of the resulting difficulties see Richard Tapper, ‘Writing tribal history’, Frontier Nomads of Iran (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–33. 4 A small number of older works paid some attention to the condition of the peasantry, including the major work dealing with land tenure in Iran, Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (London, 1953), and also Nikki Keddie, Historical Obstacles to Agrarian Change in Iran (Claremont Asian Studies, No. 8, Claremont, 1960), but these shared the general tendency to define the peasantry as essentially passive. The 1979 revolution, however, produced a shift in perspective, partly as a result of new discourses generated by the revolution itself, and partly due to the maturing of Iranian Studies as an academic discipline and its move away from traditional ‘Orientalist’ narratives. Efforts to understand the impact of the land reform of the 1960s, although they often remained focused on state policy, were particularly important in redirecting attention towards the countryside. See, inter alia, Eric Hooglund, Land and Revolution in Iran, 1960–1980 (Austin, TX, 1982); Afsaneh Najmabadi, Land Reform and Social Change in Iran (Salt Lake City, 1987); Fatemeh E. Moghadam, From Land Reform to Revolution: The Political Economy of Agricultural Development in Iran, 1962–1979 (London, 1996); Mohammad Gholi Majd, Resistance to the Shah: Landowners and Ulama in Iran (Florida, 2000). There have also been a small number of studies attempting to restore historical agency to the rural poor, see Farhad Kazemi and Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry of Modern Iran’, Iranian Studies, Vol. XI, 1978; James J. Reid, ‘Rebellion and Social Change in Astarabad, 1537–1744’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1981; Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs (London, 1985), Chapter 4; Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy and the origins of Feminism (New York, 1996), pp. 145–76; Ahmad Ashraf, ‘Dihqanan, Zamin va Inqilab’, Kitab-i Agah (special issue), Masa’il-i Arzi va Dihqani (Tehran, 1361). For a discussion of the impact on Iranian historiography of the 1979 revolution see Stephanie Cronin, ‘Writing the History of Modern Iran: a Comment on Approaches and Sources’, Iran, Vol. XXXVI, 1998. 5 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Surveys from Exile, edited and introduced by David Fernbach (London, 1973), p. 239. Although Marx recognized the existence of peasant agency per se, he saw it as necessarily limited in its scope and political object, and unable to be anything other than local. Furthermore, since the political objective of many peasant movements was anti-feudal and for the restitution of small property in one form or another, rather than for collective ownership, Marx and Marxists have tended to regard them as in the main conservative. Nonetheless conservatism in such cases should not be conflated with passivity. 6 For a discussion of the reasons for this absence see Farhad Kazemi and Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry’. For a critique of the ‘middle peasant thesis’ see Tom Brass, ‘Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized (Middle) Peasant’, in Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London, 2000). Eric Hooglund, in an extremely sophisticated study of the impact of the land reform of the 1960s on the peasantry, has also emphasized the almost total dependence and powerlessness of the Iranian peasant within the prevailing system of land tenure. Hooglund, Land and Revolution, pp. 34–5. 7 Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 392. 8 This shift in perspective owes much to the work of James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven, CT, 1976); Weapons of the Weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985). For the application of this approach to Iran see, especially, Fereydoun Safizadeh, ‘Peasant Protest and Resistance in Rural Iranian

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27

Azerbaijan’, in Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury (eds), Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (Florida, 1991). Kazemi and Abrahamian, ‘The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry’. Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, pp. 145–76. Majd, Resistance to the Shah, pp. 186–7; Ahmad Ashraf, ‘State and Agrarian Relations Before and After the Iranian Revolution, 1960–1990’, in Kazemi and Waterbury (eds), Peasants and Politics; Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, chapter 4. For some attempt to shift the focus away from the state see Stephanie Cronin (ed.), The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (London and New York, 2003). The constitutional revolution took place in 1905–1906 with the grant under popular pressure by Muzaffar al-Din Shah of a constitution and the establishment of representative government through a national assembly. The constitutional period ended in 1911 with the closure of the national assembly under the threat of invasion by Russia. The ‘White’ revolution is a collective term for the reforms, especially land reform and female enfranchisement, implemented by Muhammad Riza Shah between 1961 and 1963. The best description of agrarian society in twentieth-century Iran may be found in Hooglund, Land and Revolution. Ibid., pp. 22–8. For the bunah see Hooglund, Land and Revolution, pp. 23–8; Janet Afary has also drawn attention to the strong collective tradition represented by the bunah, Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 150. For the persistence of slave-raiding even in the 1920s, see the depositions of runaway slaves originally captured on Iranian territory and shipped across the Gulf. FO248/1387. For a description of the new burdens placed on the peasants by the arrival of the modern state, see, for example, Biscoe to Parr, Meshed, 23 May 1928, FO371/ 13064/E3551/1209/34. Moghadam, From Land Reform to Revolution, p. 44. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 184; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ, 1982), p. 149. For relations between the Ottoman State and the peasantry, see Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds), New Approaches to the State and Peasant in Ottoman History, a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 18, Nos 3 and 4, 1991. For a full discussion of the complexities of land tenure in Iran, see Lambton, Landlord and Peasant. Majd, Resistance to the Shah. See Hooglund, Land and Revolution, pp. 36–41. The constitutional period had witnessed the flourishing and wide dissemination of liberal, democratic and socialist ideas, their incorporation into the platforms of political parties such as the Democrat Party and the Moderate Party, and their reflection, to some degree, in government programmes. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 189. Such material naturally reflects the evolving agenda of the British diplomatic and commercial establishment in Iran and must be assessed within this context. In particular, it illustrates the growing desire of the British to divest themselves of their long-standing commitments to the traditional tribal authorities in southern Iran in favour of a closer and more harmonious relationship with the new regime of Riza Shah. This desire led British officials to stress increasingly the deleterious and outmoded nature of the rule of the khans and to highlight any attempts by peasants and nomads to rid themselves of this incubus. Report on the Situation in Bakhtiari, 22 September 1928, R. G. Monypenny, Consul, Ahwaz, FO416/83 pp. 141–6; Amir Husayn Karim Nikzad, Shinakht-i Sarzamin-i Chahar Mahal, Isfahan: n.p., 1357.

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28 Kerman Diary No. 27, 16–30 September 1924, FO371/10156/E10384/6329/34. 29 The Bakhtiyari inhabit a mountainous region of southwestern Iran. Their winter pastures are in northeastern Khuzistan, their summer pastures on the central Iranian plateau side of the Zagros mountains which they cross on their spring and autumn migrations. Chahar Mahal is on the eastern boundary of Bakhtiyari, and comprises a region broken by lower mountain ranges which provided both summer pastures and the habitat of a permanent sedentary village population. 30 Report on the Situation in Bakhtiari, 22 September 1928, R. G. Monypenny, Consul, Ahwaz, FO416/83, p. 143. 31 Unfortunately we have no record of the precise provisions of this programme. 32 Report on the Situation in Bakhtiari, 22 September 1928, R. G. Monypenny, Consul, Ahwaz, FO416/83, p. 143. 33 The modern secular courts established through the reorganization of the judicial system by Ali Akbar Davar, Minister of Justice, in 1927. 34 Report on the Situation in Bakhtiari, 22 September 1928, R. G. Monypenny, Consul, Ahwaz, FO416/83, p. 143. 35 See Stephanie Cronin, Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941 (London and New York, 2007), chapter 2. 36 Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 306. 37 Kerman Diary, No. 27, 16–30 September 1924, FO371/10156/E10384/6329/34. 38 Kirman appears to have been full of anjumans representing every social group and political interest. See, for example, the Kerman Diaries for 1924, FO371/10156. 39 Kerman Diary, No. 27, 16–30 September 1924, FO371/10156/E10384/6329/34. 40 Moghadam, From Land Reform to Revolution, p. 48. 41 For a fuller discussion of the Sitarah-i Bakhtiyari, see Cronin, Tribal Politics in Iran, chapter 3. 42 The programme may be found in Bridgeman to Curzon, 5 October 1921, FO371/6407/E13435/2/34. A very slightly amended version of this programme, produced in response to the severe criticism from the senior khans which had greeted its first appearance, may be found in Consul-General, Isfahan, to Loraine, 17 February 1922, FO371/7805/E4742/6/34. The programme is also reproduced in Bakhtiyar. 43 Intelligence Summary No. 28, 12 July 1924, FO371/10132/E6706/255/34. 44 On the general significance of anonymous threats, and the seriousness with which they were viewed by the authorities, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The Crime of Anonymity’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow (eds), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1975). 45 There is considerable literature on the role of rumour in popular politics. For some recent discussions, see, for example, Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001); A. Fox, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal, Vol. xl, (1997). For some discussion of the non-European world see R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1982); A. A. Yang, ‘A Conversation of Rumours: The Language of Popular Mentalites in Late Nineteenth Century Colonial India’, Journal of Social History, Vol. xx, 1987. See also L. White, ‘Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing Rumour and Gossip’, Social Dynamics, Vol. xx (1994). The impact and significance in the Iranian context of the twin phenomena of the circulation of shabnamahs and the persistence and tenacity of rumour still await research. 46 Z. Z. Abdullaev quotes several Soviet documents to this effect. Z. Z. Abdullaev, ‘Promyshlennost i zarozhdenie rabochego klasse Irana v kontse xix-nachale xx vv’ (Baku, 1963); extracts reproduced in Charles Issawi (ed.), The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914 (Chicago, IL, 1971), pp. 48–52.

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47 Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Labor Movement in Iran’, in Michael E. Bonine and Nikki Keddie (eds), 1981, Continuity and Change in Modern Iran (Albany, NY, 1981), p. 183. 48 R. W. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum Company, Vol. 1, The Developing Years (Cambridge, 1982), p. 401. The accumulation of a working class in the oil fields continued throughout the inter-war period. By 1938 the Company employed the huge number of 45,978 Iranian workers. J. H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, Vol. 2, the Anglo-Iranian years, 1928–1954 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 81. For analyses of more recent agriculture/oil linkages in Iran, see Hassan Hakimian, ‘The Impact of the 1970s Oil Boom on Iranian Agriculture’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1988; Massoud Karshenas, ‘Oil Income, Industrialization Bias, and the Agricultural Squeeze Hypothesis: New Evidence on the Experience of Iran’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1990. 49 A. T. Wilson, Resident Director, Resident, Bushire to Minister, Tehran, 13 May 1923, BP 71724. 50 For this migration see Hassan Hakimian, ‘Wage Labour and Migration: Persian Workers in Southern Russia, 1880–1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1985; Touraj Atabaki, ‘Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2003. 51 Eric Wolf, ‘Peasant Rebellion and Revolution’, in Jack A. Goldstone (ed.), Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Studies (San Diego, CA, 1986), p. 175. 52 Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 22. 53 For the benefits accruing to the khans as a result of their connection to the AngloPersian Oil Company see Cronin, Tribal Politics, chapter 6; for their acquisition of a role in central government see ibid., chapter 2; Gene R. Garthwaite, Khans and Shahs: A Documentary Analysis of the Bakhtiyari in Iran (Cambridge, 1983). 54 Major Noel’s report, Isfahan, 12 May 1921, FO371/6405/E9256/2/34. 55 For a full discussion of the context for both the urban and rural opposition, see Stephanie Cronin, ‘Modernity, Change and Dictatorship in Iran: The New Order and its Opponents, 1927–1929’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2003. 56 Kavih Bayat, 1365, Shurish-i ‘Asha’ir-i Fars (Tehran, 1365). 57 The major confederations of the Qashqai and the Khamsah both inhabited the province of Fars in southwestern Iran, the Qashqai to the southwest of the province, the Khamsah to the southeast. Both confederations found their political and economic life focused on the provincial city of Shiraz. The smaller and less important tribal groups of the Kuhgiluyyah and the Buyir Ahmadi were located in northern Fars. 58 Smaller risings also broke out among the Kurds in western Iran and among the Lurs in Pusht-i Kuh in the south–west. 59 Middle-ranking tribal leaders, heads of tribal sub-groups. 60 Clive to Henderson, 27 July 1929, FO371/13782/E3918/95/34. 61 Petition from Certain Kashgai [sic] Chiefs to His Majesty’s Consulate, Shiraz (undated), Davis, Shiraz, to Clive, 10 June, 1929, FO371/13781/E3350/95/34, petition in original Persian in FO248/1389/591/22. 62 Copy in translation of General Shaibani’s Proclamation, Clive to Henderson, 12 July, 1929, FO371/13781/E3668/95/34. 63 For an account of the course of the uprisings and their suppression see Cronin, Tribal Politics, chapter 5. 64 Notes on a Tour in Khorasan and Gurgan (Astarabad) Province, V. A. L. Mallet, 18 October, 1935, Knatchbull-Hugessesn to Hoare, 24 October 1935, FO371/ 18992?E6776/608/34. 65 Chick to Nicolson, 12 July, 1926, FO371/11502/E4812/4323/34. 66 Chick to Nicolson, 12 July, 1926, FO371/11502/E4812/4323/34.

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67 Bayat, Shurish-i ‘Asha’ir-i Fars, pp. 125–6. 68 Clive to Henderson, 27 July, 1929, FO371/13782/E3918/95/34. 69 Most famously by Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London 1969; 2000). For a different view see Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: the Ottoma Route to State Centralization, (Ithaca, NY, 1994). For a literary representation of Hobsbawm’s view of bandits in the Turkish context, see the novels of Yashar Kemal, especially Memed, My Hawk, (London, 1961); Anatolian Tales (London, 1968). Hobsbawm’s inclination to romanticize banditry has been criticized by Blok and others, who have pointed out that bandits have often acted not as challengers to, but as enforcers of, landlord power in the countryside. Bandits might, for example, threaten recalcitrant tenants or labourers on behalf of a landlord who would, in return, ensure that they were able to keep their loot and remain out of reach of the police. Anton Blok, ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1972. 70 For the concept of ‘social banditry’ see Hobsbawm, Bandits. 71 For peasant rebellions in the Caspian provinces see Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, pp. 145–76; Kazemi and Abrahamian, ‘The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry’. 72 For the politically and socially radical Jangali movement, which operated in Gilan between the constitutional revolution and the establishment of the new regime in Iran in 1921, see Kazemi and Abrahamian, ‘The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry’; Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921: Birth of the Trauma (Pittsburgh, 1995). 73 See, for example, Butler to Eden, 1 October 1936, FO371/20053/E6589/6589/34. 74 Memorandum on the Political and Economic Situation in Kermanshah, July 1935, Acting Consul Gault to Knatchbull-Hugessen, 2 August 1935, FO37118997/ E5144/5144/34. 75 Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 189. 76 The complaints of the great Hamadani land-owning family of Qaraguzlu, for example, although obviously greatly exaggerated, seem to substantiate this notion. In 1933 these landowners told a British official that their peasants were ‘completely out of hand, and appeal to the police and the law courts at every turn whenever the landlord attempts to assert his rights or declines to sanction some extravagant improvement’. Hoare to Simon, 17 March 1933, FO371/16953/E1869/1101/34. 77 Consul Hoyland to Dodd, Kermanshah, 30 September 1931, FO371/15341/E5391/146/34. 78 Consul, Sistan and Kain, to Tehran, 8 December 1930, FO371/15341/E606/146/34; Vice-Consul Summerhayes to Dodd, 28 September 1931, FO371/15341/E5391/146/34. 79 Seymour to Eden, 4 December 1937, FO371/20835/E7454/909/34. 80 Mr R. F. G. Sarell, Acting Vice-Consul, to Watkinson, Consul, Shiraz, 26 July 1937, FO371/20835/E6271/904/34. 81 John Foran, 1993, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder, CO, 1993), p. 229. 82 The best analysis of the shah’s land reform may be found in Hooglund, Land and Revolution. 83 Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, p. 196. 84 Ibid., p. 197.

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Part IV MARGINALS AND OUTCASTS

7 PROBING THE MARGINS Gypsies (Roma) in Ottoman society, c.1450–1600 Faika Çelik

Introduction In the year 1564, an imperial decree was issued from Istanbul to all Ottoman provincial and sub-provincial governors and judges, informing and commanding them as follows: Currently, in your dominions some groups of wanderers and Gypsies (kurbet ve çingan taifesi) have emerged and have been engaging in various unlawful activities (enva-ı muharremat ve esnaf-ı münkerat) and behaving immorally ( fısk [u] fücur). They have been wandering in cities, towns and villages. With their prostitutes and their entertainment and musical instruments, they have been going to social gatherings and bazaars where there are huge crowds, misleading whomever they meet and disturbing public peace. While passing through neighboring cities, in the scarcely populated areas, they have been murdering and plundering those upon whom they can prevail as well as travelers, and they have been constantly causing disorder and pursuing such abominable acts (dayima fesad ü venaatden hali olmayub). Since the removal of the harms that they have caused is necessary and indispensable, I have ordered that . . .1 This decree is but one example of many that can be found in the mühimme registers (the copies of the Imperial decrees) from 1558 to 1569 pertaining to the Gypsies (Roma) and other vagabonds wandering with them.2 According to the registers, vagrancy, murder, theft, prostitution – as illustrated in the above document – were the most common manifestations of the Gypsies’ marginality.3 Another illegal activity often associated with the Gypsies in the registers was counterfeiting coin. For instance, according to a story recorded in 1565, a counterfeiter named Çilingir Sinan (Sinan the key maker) was caught by the

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Ottoman authorities. During his interrogation, Sinan revealed the names of his partners. One of these was a Gypsy named Elsüz Çingene (Gypsy without a hand). Nor was Elsüz Çingene alone; his sons were deeply implicated as well.4 As state-generated documents, the registers delineate perceptions of Gypsy marginality by the Ottoman ruling elite. Yet were these views also shared by Ottoman society at large? In other words, did Ottoman society also see the Gypsies as a group that engaged in various unlawful activities and that was constantly causing disorder? Or were these texts just a construction of Gypsies’ marginality by Ottoman officials and elements of the ruling elite? This study attempts to answer questions such as these. More specifically, it aims to explore the attitudes of the Ottoman state and of the society toward the Gypsies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I propose that Gypsies were socially marginalized in Ottoman society and that on occasion this manifested itself through spatial exclusion. Their marginalization stemmed from a variety of factors, but particularly from their hybrid lifestyle, their indulgence in some of the “degrading” professions, as well as their non-conformity to the accepted social and moral codes. Yet their marginal condition was by no means absolute. That is to say, while they were outside the social, cultural, and religious norms of Ottoman society, they were nonetheless inside the social sphere and participated in it by fulfilling various essential roles. Some of these roles were despised yet in demand. As for the Ottoman state, despite prejudices displayed in the parlance of documents and various discriminatory policies reflected in some of their practices, Ottoman bureaucrats of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries accommodated the Gypsies and saw no harm in negotiating with them for the benefit of the state. Zoltan Barany suggests that marginality is explicated only with respect to centrality.5 In any given society it is the dominant groups that define the marginal through the lenses of accepted social, cultural, and religious norms.6 Therefore, the study of marginal groups is not only important for its own sake but also for what it reveals about the mainstream or dominant groups of society.7 In this respect, the present study not only offers glimpses into the lives and survival strategies of Gypsies but also seeks to provide a better understanding of socioeconomic realities as well as the social and moral values of mainstream Ottoman society. The time frame of this study spans the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is often argued that marginality and social exclusion are most prevalent in societies experiencing transformation, mutation, and turmoil.8 Thus, the study of Gypsies’ marginality in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is particularly instructive because it is in this period that the Empire experienced not only powerful centralized government and a flourishing economy but also political turmoil and economic distress. The period stretching from 1300–1600 is often characterized as the “classical” period in modern Ottoman historiography. It is in this period that we observe the gradual emergence of the Ottoman government structure, the foundation of the Empire’s fundamental institutions and the proclamation of major laws related to the governing of these institutions and nearly all segments of Ottoman society, including the Gypsies. However, toward the end of the 174

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“classical” period the Empire saw, in the words of Linda Darling “climate change and population growth, an influx of silver and debasement of coinage, high prices and lagging wages, commercialization, moneterization, and urban growth, military ‘revolution’, youth movements and rebellions . . .”9 The Ottoman bureaucrats of the period responded to these challenges and introduced new regulations including social control measures that led to the marginalization of some segments of society, especially those without a fixed abode. As the mühimme registers of the period demonstrate, they were particularly concerned with the movements of populations. The Celali Revolts, caused by unemployed mercenary soldiers, brought about massive migration from rural to urban areas which in turn hindered not only agricultural production but also the collection of taxes. Thus, faced with an economic downturn and the dissolution of the existing social order, the ruling elite of the period took extra measures to control the movements of the Empire’s subjects. It appears in the sources that Gypsies, with their hybrid lifestyle, became one of the primary targets of the Ottoman regime of the period.

Literature review Historians of the Ottoman Empire have hitherto written extensively not only on the polyethnic and multireligious nature of the Ottoman Empire, but also on the specific ethnic and religious groups that made up this plurality. Yet, although the Gypsies were a part of this society, they have not received critical attention from Ottomanists whether in Turkey or abroad. Recently, however, a few important studies have been devoted to the Ottoman Gypsies. Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov’s Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire is among these few.10 This study presents not only the primary source material on the Gypsies living in the Ottoman Balkans but also makes some crucial observations on their legal and social status. For Marushiakova and Popov, the Gypsies had a distinct legal status in the Empire, different from that of Muslims and non-Muslims. In fact, I follow this view but attempt to go further through an investigation of why the Ottoman state treated the Gypsies differently from other groups. Zoltan Barany’s The East European Gypsies is another contribution to the study of the Gypsies in general and Ottoman Gypsies in particular. Elucidating the status of eastern European Gypsies under different types of regimes – imperial, authoritarian, state-socialist, and democratic political systems – over a period of seven centuries, Barany discusses the Ottoman state’s policies toward the Gypsies and their socioeconomic status. On this point he argues that “the Ottoman Empire, with the marked absence of systematically repressive policies and legislation characteristic of the rest of Europe, was a haven for the Roma. The state accepted or, put differently, did not care about their customs and religious identities.”11 This argument does not entirely convey the intricate relationship between the Ottoman state and its Gypsy subjects. Nevertheless, Barany’s book is still important for the study of Ottoman Gypsies not because of its conclusions but for its methodology. Barany deploys the concept of 175

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“marginality” to analyze the status of Gypsies in eastern European societies. He maintains that “marginality – the condition of being subordinated to or excluded by others – is the central theme in Romani experience” and as such provides the best theoretical handle for understanding the status of Gypsies in eastern Europe and elsewhere.12 The present study follows the methodological framework of Zoltan Barany in that it also uses “marginality” as a methodological tool to understand the status of Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire. However, “marginality” as employed here refers to “individuals’ [or groups’] non-conformity to social and legal norms.”13 “Marginal,” as I use the term, denotes someone who lives in the society, yet insufficiently conforms to its norms. The utility of this definition is twofold: It recognizes the strong interrelationship between law and society. Laws are an emanation and reflection of the society. However, customary practices often play just as important a role as formal law in setting the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is marginal. This definition also avoids treating marginality in static terms. Societies change, as do the laws that govern them. So too do notions of marginality, as what were once vices become habits and new taboos take the place of old prohibitions.14 More recently, Eyal Ginio has probed the status of Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire in his “Neither Muslims nor Zimmis: The Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman Empire.”15 Looking through the eighteenth-century court records of Salonica, Ginio argues that the Gypsies of the Ottoman Balkans are a salient example of a group that was marginalized through stigmatization, segregation, and exclusion. According to Ginio, the Ottoman state also took part in their marginalization. For him, the most obvious evidence for Gypsies’ marginalization by the Ottoman authorities is the fact that, “whether Muslim or Christian, they were categorized as one distinct group that shared some common features – and that had to pay a special poll tax that was earmarked only for them.”16 But the Gypsies utilized an array of strategies to empower themselves, for as Ginio noted “on occasion, they were even able to win cases in court or to receive a favourable sultanic edict that supported their claims. Furthermore, they endeavoured to improve their status when the possibility arose.”17 The present article substantiates some of Ginio’s findings, especially on marginal agency, but during an earlier period, that is in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Marginality is, as we know, not a natural entity; it is a construction and it fluctuates with time and context. Thus, what was defined as marginal in eighteenth-century Ottoman society might not have been considered marginal in the sixteenth century or vice versa. Thus, an exploration of the status of Gypsies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries through sources such as the kanun (sultanic law) and the mühimme registers and travel accounts will give us an opportunity to see the versatility of the marginal condition.

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Sources While it takes into consideration the limited secondary source literature on the subject, this article relies for the most part on published Ottoman archival documents, narrative sources and Turkish oral traditions. The four major kanuns that specifically concern the Gypsies represent one of the main primary sources used in this study. They are as follows: (1) Rumeli Etrakinün Koyun Adeti Hükmi (Decree on the Number of the Sheep of the Turks in Rumelia), promulgated during the reign of Mehmed II (1451–1481); (2) Kanunname-i Cizye-i Cingenehan (The Law of the Poll-Tax for the Gypsies), issued in 1497 during the time of Bayezid II (1481–1512); (3) Kanunname-i Kıptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli (The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia), enacted in 1530; and (4) Cingane Yazmak ⁄çün Tayin Olunan Emine ve Katibine Hüküm (An Order to the Steward and his Scribe Appointed to Inscribe the Gypsies), endorsed in 1537 during the reign of Süleyman I (1520–1566).18 The most important question to be addressed in this paper in relation to the kanuns, however, is how they can help us reconstruct the history of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire. As state-generated documents, kanuns primarily delineate the intentions and the practical and fiscal concerns of the Ottoman state. In this particular case, they address the following issues: how to control the movements of the Gypsies, how to collect taxes from them, how to benefit from the Gypsies through their professions, how to integrate the nomadic Gypsies into settled society, and how to punish them for misconduct against the state as well as against settled society. However, when viewed with a critical eye, the kanuns also offer glimpses into the Gypsies’ resistance to these regulations and their strategies to ameliorate their position. Therefore, the kanuns are especially useful in evaluating how the Gypsies were referred to and categorized in state documents, how these definitions of the Ottoman bureaucracy imposed certain duties and restrictions upon the Gypsies, and how the Gypsies contested these restrictions. In addition to collections of laws, this study also relies upon the mühimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century, which include drafts and copies of the decrees decided upon in the Imperial Assembly.19 The registers contain summaries of petitions submitted to the sultan by several of his subjects and the orders given by the sultan in response to them. Overall, they deal with many issues, including, but not limited to, law and order, revenues of the state, organization of the military, and relations with foreign powers. These registers include not only records relating to extraordinary circumstances but also general imperial orders. As such “they help [us] define the expected norms.”20 Furthermore, unlike the kanuns, these texts more often than not reflect the socioeconomic and moral concerns of the petitioners and the central government’s responses to their complaints. In this study, the mühimme registers have been used to evaluate how Gypsy marginality was perceived and defined by the Ottoman authorities and by settled society. They are also extremely valuable to my analysis of the state’s actions in response to problems that were caused by the Gypsies.

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Yet “the difficulty lies in discovering to what extent these orders were implemented. No follow up orders were made on the copy of the original order, but subsequent fermans may indicate where a chronic problem exists.”21 In the case of Gypsies, the chronic problem seems to have been their habit of itinerancy, because there are many decrees issued one after another in the second half of the sixteenth century forbidding Gypsies from riding horses or carrying weapons. In addition to state documents, narrative sources such as travel accounts and oral traditions in the form of metaphors and proverbs are invaluable for examining the image of the Gypsies in Ottoman–Turkish popular culture. Moreover, despite their limitations as historical sources, the plays of Karagöz or Turkish Shadow Theatre also provide information regarding Ottoman–Turkish stereotyping of the Gypsies.22 Therefore, this article will draw upon legal texts and imperial edicts as well as narrative sources and oral traditions to reconstruct a social history of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even though these sources largely speak from the point of view of the governing elite and mainstream society, they nevertheless offer us as well a glimpse at the Gypsies’ responses to Ottoman bureaucracy and society.

Social marginality of Gypsies in Ottoman–Turkish society Gypsies were socially marginalized in Ottoman society and on occasion this marginalization manifested itself through spatial exclusion, although it should be underlined that this marginality was only relative and not absolute. That is to say, while Gypsies were marginalized through stereotyping and on occasion spatial exclusion, they were nevertheless within the society – though far from the center – and occupied certain niches. Contacts between them and those who conformed to society’s norms always existed. Bronislaw Geremek, working on the broader question of medieval marginality, suggests that “what led to social marginalization [in medieval society] was the transgression of juridical and ethical norms, customs and models or fundamental values.”23 Furthermore, he notes that certain professions and trades also imposed marginality upon their practitioners.24 Similarly, Gypsy marginalization in Ottoman society stemmed from various factors, but particularly from a socially and economically hybrid lifestyle which made them hardly suitable for legal–normative control. Evidence suggests that Gypsies were living settled and nomadic lifestyles in the fifteenthand sixteenth-century Balkans. Furthermore, they more often than not engaged in menial and “degrading” professions, possibly of a temporary nature. As such they were often seen as falling outside social and legal norms. Among the most revealing sources on this point are the mühimme registers. As noted earlier, these registers include petitions and complaints submitted to the sultan for his consideration, among them many submitted by ordinary Ottoman subjects. Even though these petitions more often than not were written down and dispatched to the sultan by a local kadı or a state agent, they nevertheless allow 178

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us to hear the voices of the petitioners and, in rare instances, those whom the petitions concerned. For instance, in 1567 the sultan issued a decree to the governor of Beyvehri in response to the latter’s report on the depredations of Gypsies in this region. It appears that the governor of Beyvehri had dispatched this report to the sultan after resolving a problem caused by Gypsies and other wanderers. The governor states that he had received a petition from the villagers of Kirili in Beyvehri complaining about Gypsies. In the petition he describes how the villagers complained about “some gypsies and wanderers, who come to our villages, wander on the roads and rob some travelers so we are not able to go from one village to another. We cannot protect our clothes, food and animals from their harm. They plunder all our belongings in our fields. They even steal our sickles and the carpets from the mosques. And so they do not respect the veriat at all.”25 On the basis of this complaint, the governor sent some of his men to investigate the case and invite the Gypsies and wanderers to behave according to the veriat. Apparently, this led to a violent confrontation, and a few people died on each side. So, after this, the governor wrote a report and informed the sultan that the situation had been brought under control by sending some of these “people of corruption” (ehl-i fesad) to prison.26 Yet it appears from the sultan’s decree that the case was not really closed. After this confrontation, two people from the region went to the sultan’s court and objected to the attitudes of the state’s agents in handling the case. These two, in the words of the sultan, belonged to the same ehl-i fesad. This decree is important for at least three reasons. First, it shows how Gypsies were seen by settled society. It appears that, due to a tendency toward vagrancy and theft, Gypsies were simply despised. Second, it demonstrates how the state dealt with them. Again, due to vagrancy and involvement in illicit activities (in this case theft), the bureaucrats were suspicious of them and stigmatized them as ehl-i fesad in the registers. Third, it shows how Gypsies responded to local state agents. Rather than submit to the agents easily, they confronted them. In protest against the abuses of the agents, they were prepared to take their case to the sultan and petition against the governor and his entourage. As very aptly suggested by Eyal Ginio, the corpus of plays known as Karagöz (Turkish Shadow Theater) offers another source of information on the stereotypes attributed to the Gypsies by Ottoman society.27 In Karagöz, one of the stock Gypsy characters is a nasty witch called Bok Ana (lit “shit mother”).28 However, since Karagöz was performed in order to make people laugh, character traits were certainly exaggerated. Furthermore, in the Karagöz tradition, not only the Gypsies, but also other religious and ethnic groups living in Ottoman territory (Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and others), were stereotyped in terms of their supposed ethnic and religious traits as well as in terms of their professions.29 I suggest that the marginality of Gypsies and the motives behind their relative exclusion from Ottoman–Turkish society are also reflected in Ottoman–Turkish oral tradition. It would be useful to begin with the term Çingene itself, the word still most often used to designate a Gypsy in Turkish. The origin of the term is still debated. The common belief is that it derives from the Byzantine Greek 179

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word Atsínganoi, which denotes itinerant wanderers and soothsayers.30 However, according to a recent book published on the Turkish Gypsies by Rafet Özkan, it may well come from a combination of two words: Çengi-gan or Çengi-gane. Çengi has two meanings: a dancing girl or a harp (çenk) player. In Persian, gan is a suffix that designates the plural of rational beings. Thus, çengi-gan would refer to either dancing girls or harp players. Since these professions have been commonly attributed to the Gypsies, according to Özkan this is the likely origin of the term Çingene.31 However, there is one more popular explanation. According to this story, When the Gypsies, driven out of their own country, arrived at Mekran, a wonderful machine was made, the wheel of which refused to turn until an evil spirit disguised as a sage, informed the chief of the Gypsies, who was named Chen, that it would do so only if he married his own sister Guin. This advice was followed and the wheel turned, but from this incestuous marriage the people earned not only the name of Chenguin but also the curse, which was put upon them by the Moslem saints, that they should be wanderers excluded from among the races of mankind.32 The metaphorical usage of Çingene, or Gypsy, in Turkish has also, of course, a derogatory meaning. It implies being shameless, impudent, ill-mannered, dishonest, and miserly.33 It is indeed “one of the worst insults that you can hurl at a Turk.”34 In Turkish idioms, Gypsies are associated with theft and labeled as being shameless and dishonest.35 In proverbs, they are portrayed as corrupt and unreliable.36 The social contempt and prejudice toward the Gypsies in Ottoman–Turkish society are perhaps best seen in the popular saying: “In Turkey, there are seventy-two and a half nations.”37 This half nation is usually taken to denote the Gypsies.

Religious beliefs and stereotyping The given names of the Gypsies in the Rumelian tax register of 1522–1523 were examined by Marushiakova and Popov in order to cast some light upon their religious beliefs. They noticed that Gypsies who were registered as Muslims often had Christian names while those who were registered as Christians often had Muslim names. Consequently, they argue that the way Gypsies were recorded in the registers might suggest “the syncretic character of their beliefs, often changing with circumstances.”38 Other genres of evidence such as travelers’ accounts also uphold this assumption, that is, that the Gypsies’ attachment to any religion was nominal.39 It appears that their lack of a well-defined religious creed was an important element in discussions about the Gypsies by both state officials and commoners. In other words their indifference to institutionalized religion, particularly Islam, is cited to reinforce state and society’s suspicion of the Gypsies. In this regard, the accounts of the celebrated seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1679) are illustrative. In his account of the Gypsies living 180

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in Gümülcine, Evliya gives the following description of their promiscuous ritual life: The Rumelian Gypsies celebrated Easter with the Christians, the festival of Sacrifice with the Muslims and Passover with the Jews. They did not accept any one religion and therefore our Imams refused to conduct funeral services for them but gave them a special cemetery outside Egri Qapu. It is because they are such renegades that they were ordered to pay an additional tax for non-Muslims (xarac). That is why a double xarac is exacted from the Gypsies. In fact, according to Sultan Mehmet’s census stipulation (tahrir) xarac is even exacted from the dead souls of the Gypsies, until the live ones are found to replace them.40 An incident reported by Alexander G. Paspati from a later period also highlights Ottoman attitudes toward Gypsies as influenced by popular perceptions of their religious beliefs. In a small village near Tchorlu, between Constantinople and Adrinople, called Deghirmen Kioy (village of the Mill), encamped in 1866 a party of wandering Tchinghianés with their bears. They had all Musulman names, and were considered Musulman Bohemians. One night one of them, called Mustapha, in passing a river with his bear, got imbedded within the mud up to his waist. His cries were heard by some workmen at a neighboring farm, but, thinking that highwaymen were at their work, they left the poor fellow to his fate. In the morning he was still found in the mud – dead. His companions went to the Greek Priest in the village to have him buried, but the priest, knowing that up to that day he had been called Mustapha, was unwilling to bury him. His companions alleged that his name was Theodore. Finally the Turks, finding no vestige of circumcision, gave him up as a Christian, and he was buried according to the rites of the Christian church.41

Professions and social marginalization As in many other societies, so in Ottoman society, a person’s occupation was one of the distinguishing signs of social status. While some professions were highly regarded, others were held in contempt and their practitioners subjected to social exclusion. To provide a hierarchical schema of all of the professions performed in Ottoman society is well beyond the scope of this study. However, we can present some of the most common professions practiced by Gypsies and offer glimpses into how those professions were dealt with by the state and considered by the rest of society. This will shed light not only on how the Gypsies – both men and women, settled and nomadic – earned their living, but also the extent to 181

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which their professions contributed to their social marginalization in Ottoman society. Furthermore, an examination of professions held by Gypsies will also offer some insight into strategies employed by the marginalized to improve their living conditions. The sources reveal that the most common professions held by Gypsies were in the entertainment sector. As “entertainers” they formed a quite heterogeneous category in which they functioned as musicians, boy and girl dancers, and animal trainers, among other things.42 In the mühimme registers, they were often portrayed as itinerant entertainers serving the public by organizing parties either in front of their tents or in wedding processions. The registers reveal that, during these parties, they were involved in singing, dancing, and prostitution. Due to engagement in such “vice trades,” others often despised the Gypsies, and brought complaints before the authorities, asking for their expulsion from their communities.43 Apart from itinerant Gypsy entertainers in Anatolia and Rumelia, our sources indicate that in Istanbul there were professional Gypsy musicians, as well as girl and boy dancers, who belonged to entertainment guilds.44 According to Evliya Çelebi, these professional entertainers’ companies (kols) numbered almost three hundred during his time and were an indispensable part of wedding processions held by the palace and the governing elite, as well as a fixture at public festivals.45 Another well-known category of Gypsy entertainers was that of bear-trainers. According to Evliya Çelebi, they also formed a guild in Istanbul.46 Gypsies with their dancing bears were, in fact, a common sight in the most populated areas of the imperial capital, and watching dancing bears was one of the most common entertainments for ordinary people.47 Though Gypsies exercised this profession until recently in Turkey, their involvement with it caused tension. For instance, an imperial decree, sent to the judge of Istanbul in 1761, informs us that Gypsies had begun to live among the Muslim residents of the Hoca Ali quarter of Edirne Kap␫, and that the residents were concerned about the Gypsies’ insanitary animals, their possession of flammable materials (which they used to make brooms), and their engagement in many varieties of sinful activities (enva-i fuhviyyat). Consequently, they petitioned the authorities to expel these Gypsies, and as a result the sultan ordered the judge of Istanbul to remove Gypsies from the said quarter, which had been historically a Muslim neighborhood.48 It should be noted however that these spatial exclusions were not systematic. They usually happened only when there was a public complaint against the Gypsies, and when excluded from one neighborhood they seemed to find a niche in another. In a decree issued in 1763, for instance, we see them living even in the Fatih district, which was known for its educational, religious, and commercial importance.49 Gypsies were also identified with prostitution. Marushiakova and Popov note that in the tax registers of sixteenth-century Rumelia “there were even whole tax communities registered for fiscal purposes as gaining their income from this trade [prostitution].”50 Prostitution is considered a zina (crime) in Islamic law. Hence, depending upon the civil status of the prostitute – that is, unmarried or married – the

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punishment would be either flogging or stoning to death. However, scholars who have examined court records have disclosed that prostitutes were rarely subject to corporal punishment in the application of the law in the Ottoman Empire. Instead, prostitutes were more often penalized by other forms of punishment such as fines or banishment.51 The wording of The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia, promulgated in 1530, is worth noting in this regard. In it, the sultan commands that “the Gypsies of Rumelia, Istanbul, Edirne, Filibe and Sofya pay one hundred akçes as a fixed tax (kesim) in every month for their wives who are involved in an unlawful act (na mevru fiile mübaveret iden).”52 The mühimme registers also provide information on the state’s attitude toward prostitution in some Gypsy communities. For instance, in a decree issued in 1570, Gypsies are accused of using their wives and daughters for prostitution and retaining the profits this generated without giving the state its due.53 The question that this raises is: Why were the prostitutes not punished with what was prescribed in the letter of law? I suggest that this was due to a consideration of the social consequences of the situation. Not everybody could afford to marry or buy concubines in Ottoman society. Therefore, prostitution functioned as a safety valve in the controlling of male sexual desire and as such filled a niche in Ottoman society. Furthermore, it seems that it was a lucrative source of revenue for the state, when properly managed. In short, due to these considerations prostitution was accommodated by the state and tolerated by the legal authorities. Gypsies’ involvement in this trade has demonstrated to us how the Ottoman authorities dealt with prostitution. Yet from the subaltern perspective, their engagement in this trade also offers us a glimpse into one of the survival strategies available to paupers in Ottoman society. Metalsmithing was another trade in which Gypsies commonly engaged. Their expertise in this field proved to be a boon for them; not only were Gypsies much sought after by military officials for their skill in the manufacturing of weapons, but they also drew on this expertise to counterfeit coins, thus drawing the attention of another branch of the state. At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, unstable market conditions unleashed a flood of various substandard coins onto the Ottoman market which in turn created ideal conditions for counterfeiting.54 It appears that some Gypsies used this market instability to their own advantage and indulged in this illicit trade.55 For instance, according to an imperial decree sent to the chief judge of Aydın in 1596, the sultan noted that most of the Gypsies living in this sub-province practiced counterfeiting as a profession. Therefore, he ordered that the wrongdoers be sent to the sultan’s court (südde-i saâdet) with their instruments of counterfeiting.56 What happened to these culprits in the sultan’s court remains unknown as the sources fall silent at this point. However, as Suraiya Faroqhi suggests, we can guess what might have happened to them by referring to the Ottoman criminal law codified in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.57 According to the law issued during the reign of Sultan Mehmed II, the counterfeiters would have faced execution.58 However, according to the penal kanunname of Sultan Süleyman the Lawgiver, the punishments to be

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meted out to the counterfeiters ranged from death (siyaset) to stigmatizing corporal punishment, or penal servitude in the galleys (kürek).59 These punishments might vary according to the number of offences and the status of the criminal. For instance, out of respect for their position, members of the ulema could not be sentenced to death even if they were guilty of counterfeiting. Instead, they were more likely to face stigmatizing corporal punishments such as amputation of the hand. The counterfeiters of Aydın were probably not so fortunate. Some Gypsies, however, were valued by the Ottoman state and granted certain privileges because of their expertise in metalsmithing. According to a law promulgated during the reign of Mehmed II, some Gypsies were exempted from the poll-tax in return for their service in iron-making for the army. The sultan’s command is worth quoting And do not take the poll tax (haraç)60 from those Gypsies who were assigned to work on matters connected to the fortresses or for iron-making, provided they either have my decree or a letter from the governor. If anyone joins those Gypsies claiming to be a smith or sifter in order to escape the poll tax he should be made aware that he will be reprimanded.61 The law is quite explicit, and yet it also hints at strategies resorted to by subaltern groups to evade taxation. Apparently, Gypsies and other subaltern groups often attempted to use this route in order to avoid the poll-tax and improve their position in society. Another opportunity afforded to the Gypsies can be seen from the fact that, starting from the beginning of the sixteenth century, some of them served in the army as müsellems (lit. “(those who are) exempt”).62 In return for their services to the military, such as casting cannon balls, carrying and repairing guns, and building roads, they were not only granted lands to cultivate but also gained taxfree status.63 Since their services were valuable to the Ottoman army müsellems were ranked between the ruling and the subject class.64 Some Gypsies also served the sultans as executioners. As in many areas of state and government administration, the Ottomans institutionalized this “undesirable” profession. Starting from the seventeenth century, executioners recruited from the Gypsy and the Croatian peoples formed the bulk of the corps of executioners (cellad ocaæı) and functioned under the authority of the Corps of the Imperial Guards (bostancı ocaæı). Hence, this “undesirable” occupation was legitimized by the Ottoman state. Nevertheless, its practitioners remained socially despised on religious and moral grounds.65 They were so despised that, even after death, they were segregated from other souls through burial in the cellad mezarlıæı of Istanbul, the state cemetery reserved exclusively for the burial of the state’s executioners.66 Yet another “undesirable” occupation pursued by the Gypsies was that of fortune-telling.67 Apparently, Istanbul’s famed fortune-tellers of the second half of the nineteenth century were all Muslim Gypsy women.68 Gypsies were socially marginalized in Ottoman society through stereotyping and, on occasion, spatial exclusion. Their hybrid lifestyles and indulgence in certain 184

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degrading professions, as well as their nonconformity to accepted social and moral codes, are considered to have been the source of their marginalization. It should be underlined, however, that their marginal condition was only relative. That is to say, while they were marginalized, they were nevertheless active within society and met a variety of its needs. While some of their vocations, such as horse and cattle dealing, were also practiced by other Ottoman subjects, other activities, such as dancing and prostitution, were condemned by Islamic law and forbidden to Muslims and yet no less popular for all that. Due to their engaging in these vices, Gypsies were considered immoral and harmful to the well-being of communities. The petitions presented to the Ottoman authorities demanding their expulsion from certain neighborhoods serve as evidence of this attitude. However, these spatial exclusions seem only relative as their relations with those who conformed to society’s norms continued on various occasions such as festivals and wedding ceremonies. Furthermore, Gypsies were not powerless against the misconduct of state agents. As we have seen, they even went to the sultan to petition against unfair practices. Furthermore, they attempted to ameliorate their position in society by resorting to different strategies.

The Ottoman state’s policy toward the Gypsies The legal status of the Gypsies in Ottoman society is atypical considering the principles on which the Ottoman social structure was based.69 The sources that nurtured the development of this structure were diverse and varied; nevertheless, the basic ideology that shaped social organization was derived to a large extent from Islamic principles. The state identified itself as Islamic and devoted itself to the promotion of the faith and application of the veriat. The kanuns or sultanic legislations and local practices of the conquered territories also incorporated these ideals. However, in practical terms, the concept of “religious community” was increasingly promoted as the basic unit of administrative organization with the inclusion of large non-Turkic and non-Muslim populations.70 Already by the second half of the fifteenth century, the sultan’s subjects were organized along confessional lines. Membership in a given confessional community or millet was one of the crucial factors in determining a subject’s rights and obligations. From the Ottoman point of view, rather than ethnic or linguistic solidarity, religion was the basis of communal identity.71 By contrast, however, the administration of the Gypsies was based on ethnicity rather than religious affiliation.72 For the Gypsies of Rumelia in the sixteenth century, this arrangement can be seen through an examination of the administrative unit called the liva-i çingane. In the Ottoman provincial administration, the liva or sancak was used to designate “a district encompassing, at rough estimate, an area of several thousand square miles and a population perhaps a hundred thousand on the average.”73 On the other hand – despite their fragmentary nature – the sources suggest that the liva-i çingane or çingane sancaæı (sub-province of Gypsies) was not a geographical entity. Rather, it was a political and administrative division 185

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that was formed for the organization of the Gypsies in Edirne, Istanbul, and the rest of Rumelia probably at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century.74 Sources on the historical geography of the Ottoman Empire also provide further evidence that the liva-i çingane or çingane sancaæı was not a geographical district constituting part of the province of Rumelia.75 As the Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia (Kanunname-i Kiptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli) indicates, Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies, whether settled or nomadic, were attached to this administrative sub-province based upon their ethnicity.76 The head of the sub-province, called the mir-i kibtiyan, çingene sancaæı beæi, or çingene beæi, like a confessional community leader, was made responsible for collecting the taxes from his Gypsy community and the organization of its relations with the state.77 A second indication that the Ottoman state classified Gypsies according to their ethnicity comes from census documents. According to Kemal Karpat, in the population registers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ottomans classified their subjects as Muslims and non-Muslims. The latter were further classified as Christian, Armenian, or Jewish. Then he adds, “oddly enough, [there is] a separate classification for Kıpti, i.e., Gypsies.”78 The term Kıpti deserves further explanation for the purposes of this study. In Arabic as well as in Ottoman Turkish, Kıpti means “Copt” or “native Egyptian.” As is the case with the English “Gypsy,” Spanish “Gitano” and French “Gitane,” the Ottoman usage of Kıpti results from the common belief during the period that the Roma originated in Egypt.79 According to Stanford Shaw, because of this terminology the Gypsies were mistakenly attached to the Armenian millet.80 In discussing the Armenian millet, Selahi Sonyel also states that: He [the Armenian Patriarch] also ruled over all the Christians who did not belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. These included the Monophysitic churches of Asia Minor, and later Africa such as the Jacobites, Syrians, Ethiopians, Georgians, Chaldeans, Copts and all the Gypsies of the Empire, in matters of civil law.81 However, according to the imperial decree that was bestowed upon the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1517 by Selim I, only Copts were attached to the Armenian millet along with Ethiopians and Syriac Christians. There is no indication in this decree that the Gypsies were also included in the abovementioned confessional community.82 Furthermore, according to ⁄smail Havim Altınöz, “the Gypsies living in the Ottoman Empire were never granted millet status and were never attached to any Muslim or Christian confessional community. Indeed, they were treated as guests waiting in the hall.”83 Thus, whether the Gypsies were officially attached to any millet is a question that requires further investigation. The above discussion suggests that Ottoman bureaucrats classified Gypsies according to their ethnicity and created a category distinctive to them. But how

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can we explain this phenomenon? What was the rationale behind the creation of the liva-i çingane? Was it to marginalize the Gypsies or to accommodate them within the system? I am inclined to see this phenomenon more as an act of accommodation than of marginalization.84 The Liva-i çingane was a parallel millet category, that is, it was an administrative rather than a spatial or geographical unit and was based on ethnic as opposed to religious affiliation. As noted, Gypsy beliefs were syncretic in nature, making it difficult for Ottoman bureaucrats to categorize them along confessional lines. Thus, it seems as though the ruling elite of the period came up with an alternative category parallel to the millet structure in order to accommodate the Gypsies. It should be added, however, that this arrangement was also convenient for the fiscal needs of the state. Instead of outlawing Gypsies as social and moral misfits, the state gave them an extra-millet status, outside the regular arrangement, and adapted its system to include them within the Empire’s social and administrative framework (thereby ensuring that taxes due to the state were paid). In addition to these efforts, there is other evidence of the state’s willingness to adapt to the Gypsies. One kanun issued in the time of Mehmed II states: When the poll tax of the said Gypsies is collected, the judges of every administrative unit should appoint a trustworthy person who is useful to them [the Gypsies]. Migrating with [the Gypsies], he should collect their poll tax and provide proof of this; should the Gypsies dispute it later on, they should have a title deed. He should take the poll tax of each Gypsy, record this in the annals and remove their names from the register after they pay their poll tax.85 This suggests that the state adapted to the differences in the Gypsies’ lifestyle. Instead of ordering them to settle, the state invented a mobile tax collector. This policy seemed to continue with some modifications into the sixteenth century as well. As reflected in the other kanuns of the period, the state sent tax collectors to the Gypsies, but made Gypsy leaders and community members responsible for finding defaulting Gypsies on penalty of themselves having to pay the poll-tax in their place. The accommodation of the Gypsies by the state even extended to those Gypsies who engaged in prostitution. As noted, according to the veriat, prostitution is a zina crime, the punishment for which is 100 lashes for an unmarried culprit and stoning to death for a married offender.86 However, evidence suggests that those Gypsies who engaged in prostitution were rarely sentenced to corporal punishment in the Ottoman Empire. Rather, other forms of punishment, such as banishment, fines, or jail sentences, were applied in most cases. However, all this is not to suggest that the Ottoman bureaucrats were innocent of any discriminatory attitudes toward the Gypsies. In fact, they most certainly were and this was reflected in several of their policies. The military institution is a case in point.

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Exclusion of Gypsies: the military institution In Ottoman society, the status of each individual or group was fixed in order to control and manage the subaltern classes. However, there were some avenues of upward social mobility as far as the subject class was concerned. The devvirme system, or periodic levy of (mainly) Christian boys, is often regarded as one of them. However, this prospect was not open to all subjects of the sultan. Romanians, Wallachians, and Moldavians were not levied because they were vassals and not actual subjects of the sultan. Jews and Gypsies were left out as well. According to Goodwin, author of The Janissaries, the former were spared because they were professionals who served the great pashas and whose faith was as firm as that of any Muslim, while the latter were exempt because they were clearly detested.87 Thus, Gypsies were not permitted to exploit this “window of opportunity.” Some Gypsies, however, came to be valued by the Ottoman state and were granted certain privileges because of their expertise in metalworking. We noted earlier how, according to the law promulgated during the reign of Mehmed II, some Gypsies were exempted from the poll-tax (haraç) in return for the auxiliary services they provided to the army. The law also suggests that despite the state’s precautions, Gypsies often attempted to use this route in order to avoid the poll-tax and improve their position in society.88 Starting from the beginning of the sixteenth century, we see some Gypsies serving in the army as müsellems (lit., exempt), granted lands and a tax-free status in return for their services to the military.89 Those Gypsies who were identified as müsellems were attached to the liva-i müselleman-i çingane (the sub-province of the tax-exempted Gypsies). As in the case of liva-i çingane, the term liva or sub-province here was not used in the sense of a geographically defined administrative unit, but rather refers to a group of tax-exempted Gypsies dwelling in the province of Rumelia.90 The existence of this administrative unit suggests that Ottoman ruling elite had varying views of the Gypsies. On the one hand they despised the Gypsies and this was reflected in the parlance of the documents and some of their institutional policies. Yet on the other hand, they did not see any harm in negotiating with them as long as they served the interests of the state by performing essential and useful services.91

Taxation and resistance As stated earlier, all Rumelian Gypsies, Muslim and non-Muslim, settled and nomadic, were attached in the sixteenth century to the same administrative unit, that is, the Gypsy sancak. Yet as the kanuns suggest, their obligations to the state – the most important being that of paying taxes – differed. The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia spells this out in detail: Muslim Gypsies (müslüman çinganeler) of Istanbul, Edirne and other places in Rumeli must pay twenty-two akçes tax (resm) for each household and for each bachelor. Infidel Gypsies (kafir çingeneler) will pay 188

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twenty-five akçes poll tax (ispenç) for each household and for each bachelor. As for their widows, they are to pay six akçes tax (resm).92 However, Muslim Gypsies could only benefit from the lower rate of taxation so long as they did not intermingle with or move from place to place with non-Muslim Gypsies. Otherwise, they were required to pay the higher poll tax and were subject to punishment as well.93 Indeed, the basis of this regulation can be found in The Decree on the Number of Sheep of the Turks in Rumelia of Mehmed the Conqueror, which commands that: [A] Gypsy who is a Muslim (müslüman olan çingene) should not reside with an infidel [Gypsy], but should intermingle with the Muslim [Gypsies]. However, if he continues to reside [with infidel Gypsies] and does not intermingle with the Muslims, then detain him and collect his poll tax.94 As illustrated in the above passage, the kanuns always make a distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies when regulating their taxation. While the amount paid by the non-Muslims was called haraç, cizye or ispençe, the amount paid by the Muslims was invariably called kesm or resm.95 Nevertheless, notwithstanding different designations, there seemed to exist little difference between the amount of tax paid respectively by Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies. How can we explain this situation? Were the Ottoman authorities discriminating against Muslim Gypsies by taxing them excessively? And why did the Ottoman state insist that Muslim Gypsies not migrate internally with their non-Muslim fellows? Relying mainly upon the sicills or the veriat court records of eighteenth-century Ottoman Salonica, Eyal Ginio argues that Muslim Gypsies were even subject to poll-tax (cizye) in the Ottoman Balkans. Nevertheless, the amount of the poll-tax that Muslim Gypsies paid was less than that of non-Muslim Gypsies. Ginio acknowledges that “the scribes named the tax imposed upon the Muslim Gypsies as bedel-i mektu’ – that is to say, ‘the equivalent of the fixed tax’.”96 However, he contends that this was in fact a poll-tax and that bedel-i mektu’ was just a semantic device used to legitimize imposing the poll-tax upon a Muslim group.97 To Ginio, the root cause of this discriminatory policy is to be sought not in Gypsies’ otherness – the dominant explanation in the field – but in the local customs that prevailed in the area before the Ottomans.98 Evidence suggests the poll-tax was levied on Gypsies in the region before the arrival of the Ottomans.99 Furthermore, Machiel Kiel, working on the Ottoman Balkans, demonstrates that “the Ottomans continued to levy pre-Ottoman and local poll-taxes by renaming them cizye’ in the region.100 Following Kiel, Ginio argues that “the Gypsy poll tax supplied the state with significant revenues . . . It is quite clear, then, why the state was inclined to maintain this tax and continue its collection. The authorities circumvented the legal problem of levying a poll tax from Muslims by designating a different term that was devoid of the original religious meaning. Its essence, however, remained the same.”101 At the present stage of my research and in light of my sources, 189

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I believe it would be misleading and essentialist to suggest that Ottoman bureaucrats levied cizye on the Muslim Gypsies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I think the etymology of these terms – kesm and resm – should be analyzed before concluding that the Ottomans imposed cizye upon a Muslim group. However, I will leave this pertinent question for future research. Notwithstanding these minor differences between the taxes imposed on Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies, the kanuns interestingly suggest that some Gypsies converted to Islam to avoid the poll-tax.102 Consequently, the state expected them to “normalize” into sedentary Muslim subjects following Islamic rules. Yet it appears that even though some Gypsies claimed to have become Muslims, they did not obey the veriat in the eyes of the ruling elite because they “migrated with their women” and “did not desist from relations with infidel Gypsies.”103 Even the hint of apostasy was a serious matter in a society ruled by Islamic law, and yet instead of a punishment for those who reverted away from Islam, the state only asked for a fine – in this case the poll-tax – from the Gypsies who were nominally Muslim but continued to be “infidels” in the eyes of the Ottoman government. As in the case of those Gypsies who indulged in prostitution, the state here seemed to be more accommodating than might have been expected. Eyal Ginio very appropriately states that “while their [the Gypsies’] nomadic lifestyle was the source of their social marginalization, it also gave them a way to resist the local state agents.”104 He illustrates, on the basis of the Salonica sicills, that Gypsies were not powerless against the abuses of local state agents and resisted corrupt state agents through various strategies such as “abandoning the dwellings, running away or pretending to having paid the tax elsewhere.”105 The kanuns and the mühimme registers of the sixteenth century also corroborate this picture. In these documents we see that Gypsies developed certain strategies to deal with state agents in general and tax collectors in particular. Pretending to be a smith or a sifter working for the sultan,106 deserting their communities, hiding in the fields, migrating at night, and posing as shepherds or sipahis were just some of the strategies that Gypsies employed in order to get away with misdemeanors and avoid paying taxes.107 While Gypsies exercised such ingenuity to escape their fiscal responsibilities, the Ottoman state – as discussed above – adapted to some aspects of their residential mobility, production activities, and lifestyle, developing certain techniques to take advantage of these unruly subjects. In the fifteenth century, we find tax collectors moving with the Gypsies. In the sixteenth century, the sultan again sent his tax agents to the Gypsies. However, this second time it was not the tax collector but rather the leaders of the Gypsy communities who were made responsible for tracing defaulters. If the missing Gypsies were not found, the leaders were required to pay the taxes in their place.108 Nevertheless, it appears from the mühimme registers that the Ottomans were not fond of their vagrant subjects, including the Gypsies. Therefore, attempts were always being made to restrict their movements or to settle them.

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Punishments Partly due to the stigma attached to Gypsies, and partly due to the Ottomans’ desire for a settled society with predictable revenues, attempts were always being made to control the movements of the Gypsies.109 For instance, according to an imperial decree issued in 1572, they were forbidden to cross back and forth from the Rumelian to the Anatolian side of Istanbul by way of the straits. If they did so, they were to be imprisoned.110 At some point in the sixteenth century, they were not even allowed to work as dealers (cambaz) in the horse market of Istanbul.111 They were furthermore strictly forbidden to ride a horse or to carry a weapon. Gypsies with their horses and weapons were identified as sources of social discontent and as a cause of civil and moral disorder.112 As noted, in the formulaic language of the registers, Gypsies and other groups wandering with them (gurbet ve cingan taifesi) were labeled as ehl-i fesad by the authorities.113 How did the Ottomans deal with these “people of corruption”? What was their attitude toward the Gypsies and other groups wandering with them in the second half of the sixteenth century? The mühimme registers reveal that when Gypsies posed a threat to public peace and security, they were either put into prison or sent to the galleys.114 Yet more often than not they experienced an older form of marginalization, that of banishment. In Istanbul, Gypsies were originally settled in the quarter of Edirne Kapısı.115 In a decree issued in 1763, for example, we are informed that the Gypsies had begun to live in the Fatih district, which was known for its educational, religious, and commercial importance.116 According to the verdict, since the Gypsies had been partaking in various sinful activities, they were to be expelled and returned to Edirne Kapisi where they had been living in the past.117 However, as the criminal kanunname of Sultan Süleyman I indicates, the expulsion of the Gypsies from cities (as well as from the countryside) due to their nonconformity to legal and social norms had a long precedent. According to the decree, Some gypsies are not settled in small towns or villages and do not go peaceably about [their] business, but arm themselves, mount on horseback and roam the villages and countryside, oppressing and wronging the peasants. These [offenders] have since ancient times been called (?). As an old kanun prescribes, such mischief makers shall be expelled and driven from the country.118 It should be underlined however that the Ottomans employed banishment more often than not only when there was a public complaint against the Gypsies. Furthermore, even when the Gypsies were banished from one neighborhood or city, they seemed to find niches in others. The fact that they came and settled in the Fatih district suggests the versatility of their marginal condition. Even though they were stereotyped and disliked in Ottoman society, they were able to

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find a niche in one of the most central sections of the city. Furthermore, in the eighteenth-century Ahkâm registers of Istanbul, one encounters references to Gypsies living in Muslim neighborhoods.119 Eventually, they were expelled from these neighborhoods due to their engagement in illicit trades or immoral activities. However, what is striking about this is that they were able to establish themselves in these neighborhoods in the first place.

Conclusion Drawing mainly upon the kanuns issued in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mühimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century, and Ottoman–Turkish oral traditions, this study has attempted to demonstrate that the marginality of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was neither absolute and unchanging nor inflexible and complete. The interaction of the Gypsies both with the state and with Ottoman society at large was both hostile and symbiotic. While the Gypsies occupied a space far from the center of power, they always had a place in society and in the state’s administrative apparatus. Gypsies engaged in various professional activities and played a necessary role in Ottoman society. While some of their vocations, such as horse and cattle dealing, were also practiced by Ottoman subjects,120 some others such as dancing and prostitution were condemned by Islamic law and forbidden to Muslims. Due to their engagement in these activities, they were considered to be immoral and harmful to the well-being of Muslim communities. The petitions submitted to the Ottoman authorities for their expulsion serve as evidence of this attitude. On the other hand, these spatial exclusions were only relative. That is to say, while Gypsies were excluded from certain neighborhoods, they seemed to find a niche in others. Furthermore, there is no indication in the sources that they were used as slaves, which was the practice in Moldavia and Wallachia during the same period. Nor, as was the case in Europe, were they actively persecuted for their non-conformity to accepted legal and social norms.121 The Ottoman ruling elite of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had prejudices against the Gypsies. This is reflected in the language of the contemporary Ottoman documents and some of their policies. In the state documents, specifically in the mühimme registers, the Gypsies were stigmatized as ehl-i fesad. Furthermore, they were not allowed to hold privileged positions in Ottoman society as they were not admitted to the military class. In addition, whenever they were perceived as a threat to public order, they were expelled from villages and neighborhoods. Moreover, as their hybrid lifestyle was seen as a threat to public security and the well-being of the state, attempts were always made to control their movements. And yet, notwithstanding their stigmatization in the parlance of documents and in discriminatory policies, the Ottoman bureaucrats of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also accommodated the Gypsies within the Empire. This was accomplished through an administrative unit called the liva-i çingane (the sub-province of the Gypsies). Although it was called a sub-province, it was not a geographical 192

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entity: the Gypsies of Istanbul and Rumelia alike were attached to this province for organizational purposes. As such the liva-i çingane was created as a category similar to a millet. All Gypsies, both Muslim and non-Muslim, settled and nomadic, were attached to this “province” based not on their religion but rather on their ethnicity. The evidence even suggests that the Gypsies’ belief system was more syncretic in nature than either Muslim or Christian. Due to this fact, the Ottoman bureaucrats must have been forced to categorize the Gypsies ethnically as the basic unit of the society (religion) did not fit the Gypsies. Thus, despite the difficulty of accommodating the Gypsies within the millet system, the state, instead of outlawing the Gypsies as social and moral misfits, gave them an extra-special status outside its normal administrative apparatus. In short, through the formation of the liva-i çingane, the state actually adapted its system to accommodate these unruly subjects, if only for its own fiscal advantage. As for the taxation of the Gypsies, this study offers nothing new but does point out avenues for further research. Modern discourse on the Ottoman Gypsies suggests that the Ottomans discriminated against Muslim Gypsies by taxing them illegally, as there existed only a minor difference between the taxes paid by Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies. Eyal Ginio takes this idea further and argues that the Ottomans levied cizye on Muslim Gypsies in the Ottoman Balkans. Even though little separated the taxes assessed on Muslim and non-Muslim Gypsies in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century kanuns, at the present stage of my research I believe it would be misleading to conclude that the Ottomans levied cizye on Muslim Gypsies in these centuries. Interestingly, despite the minimal advantage to be gained, some non-Muslim Gypsies converted to Islam to avoid the poll-tax. Indeed, evidence suggests that Gypsies resorted to many other strategies to avoid paying their taxes. Furthermore, they contested the misconduct of the state agents, even when this meant going to the sultan’s court and petitioning against the transgressions of the officials. Moreover, they were aware of the opportunities available to them in Ottoman society and attempted to use them to improve their status – a fact attested by their willingness to apply their talents in the service of the sultan’s army. The study of marginality in general, and of the Gypsies in particular, has not been a major concern in modern Ottoman historiography. However, the study of Gypsies and other marginalized groups like them provides an insight into the society in which they lived. Thus, I hope this research has not only shed light upon the history of the Gypsies but that has also made a contribution to the active debate in Ottoman historiography about the functioning of the “plural society” of the Ottoman Empire.

Notes This study is based on my MA thesis, which I wrote under the supervision of A. Üner Turgay, to whom I am deeply indebted. I would like also to express my gratitude to the friends and teachers whose comments on various versions of this study have been invaluble: Rula Abisaab, Stephanie Cronin, Wael Hallaq, Michelle Hartman, Donald P. Little, Hasher Majoka and Stefan Winter. Finally, I owe very special thanks

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1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9

to Dana Sajdi for her most perceptive criticisms and for her much valued support throughout this project. Needless to say, all shortcomings are my own responsibility. To a large extent, this study relies on the Mühimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century. These include: 3 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (966–968/ 1558–1560), 2 vols (Vol. 1: Özet ve Transkripsiyon; Vol. 2: Tıpkıbasım), ed. ⁄smet Binark, Necati Aktav, and Necati Gültepe (Ankara: T. C. Bavbakanlık, Devlet Arvivleri Genel Müdürlüæü, 1993); 5 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (973/1565–1566), 2 vols (Vol. 1: Özet ve ⁄ndex; Vol. 2: Tıpkıbasım), ed. ⁄smet Binark, Necati Aktav, and Necati Gültepe (Ankara: T. C. Bavbakanlık, Devlet Arvivleri Genel Müdürlüæü, 1994); 6 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (972/1564–1565), 3 vols (Vol. 1–2: Özet, Transkripsiyon ve ⁄ndex; Vol. 3: Tıpkıbasım), ed. ⁄smet Binark, Necati Aktav, and Necati Gültepe (Ankara: T. C. Bavbakanlık, Devlet Arvivleri Genel Müdürlüæü, 1995); 7 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (975–976/1567–1569), 6 vols (Vols 1–4: T Özet, Transkripsiyon ve ⁄ndex; Vols 5–6: Tıpkıbasım), ed. Murat Vener, Nurullah ⁄vler, and H. Osman Yıldırım (Ankara: T. C. Bavbakanlık, Devlet Arvivleri Genel Müdürlüæü, 1997); 12 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (978–979/1570–1572), 3 vols (Vols 1–2: Özet, Transkripsiyon ve ⁄ndex; Vol. 3: Tıpkıbasım), ed. ⁄smet Binark, Necati Aktav, and Necati Gültepe (Ankara: T. C. Bavbakanlık, Devlet Arvivleri Genel Müdürlüæü, 1996). In subsequent citations, they will be referred to as “MD.” The numbers following represent the volume of the Mühimme Defteri, the volume of its transliterated version (in parentheses), then the page and series numbers. Thus, the reference for this first decree is MD 6 (I), 114.206. Since the term “Gypsy” (a derivative of “Egyptian”) and its derivatives have derogatory connotations, Gypsies generally prefer to be identified as Roma, which means “men” in the Romani language. The singular of the word is Rom and the adjective is Romani. However, there are some who would rather be called “Gypsies” in the official language of their country of residence. See Zoltan Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1; David M. Crowe, “Roma: The Gypsies,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350–2000, ed. Peter N. Stearns, 6 vols (New York: Scribner, 2000), 1:449. In modern Turkey, most Gypsies identify themselves as Roma because Çingene, the most common word used to designate them, has pejorative implications. However, some would rather be identified as Çingene. See for instance Nazım Alpman, Bavka Dünyanın ⁄nsanları Çingeneler (Istanbul: Ozan Yayıncılık, 1997), 53–6; Ali Arayıcı, Ülkesiz Bir Halk: Çingeneler (Istanbul: Ceylan Yayınları, 1999), 172–4. In the Ottoman texts, they are referred to as Çingene (Gypsy) or Kıpti (“Copt,” or native Egyptian). Thus, in accordance with my sources, both primary and secondary, I generally use “Gypsies” rather than “Roma.” See for instance MD 5 (I), 35.186; MD 5 (I), 58.311; MD 5 (I), 231.1438; MD 7 (I), 110.216; MD 12 (I), 228.344. MD 6 (II), 213.1196. Suraiya Faroqhi presents a similar case in which a Gypsy was accused of being a counterfeiter in her “Counterfeiting in Ankara,” in Coping with the State: Political Conflict and Crime in the Ottoman Empire 1550–1720 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1995), 133–43. Barany, The East European Gypsies, 58. Ibid. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, “Introduction,” in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society: Selections from the Annales, Vol. IV, ed. R. Forster and O. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, 7–12), 8. Danielle Laberge and Shirley Roy, “Marginalité et exclusion sociales: des lieux et des formes,” Cahiers de Recherche sociologique, 22(1994): 5. Linda Darling, “Ottoman Fiscal Administration: Decline or Adaptation?” Journal of European Economic History, 26(1997): 167.

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10 Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire: A Contribution to the History of the Balkans, ed. Donald Kenrick, trans. Olga Apostolova (Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press; Paris: Centre de recherches tsiganes, 2000). 11 Barany, The East European Gypsies, 92. 12 Barany, The East European Gypsies, 2, 62. 13 “Marginally” is a contested concept. It does not have a single definition and uniform usage. For the problematics of “marginality” and “marginal” see, for instance, Ferguson, Russell (ed.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Mehretu. A., Pigozzi, B., Sommers, L. “Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality.” Human Geography 82.2 (2000): 89–101; Rutledge, Dennis M. (ed.), Marginality, Power and Social Structure: Issues in Race, Class, and Gender Analysis (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005). This study adopts flexible working definition of “marginality” offered by Eugene Rogan, “Introduction,” in Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 3. 14 Ibid. 15 Eyal Ginio, “Neither Muslims nor Zimmis: The Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman Empire,” Romani Studies, 5, 14.2.2004: 117–44. 16 Ibid., 141. 17 Ibid., 141–2. 18 For facsimiles, transliterations, and concise interpretations of these regulations, see – in the following order – Ahmed Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, 8 vols (Istanbul: Fey Vakfı Yayınları, 1990), Vol. 1, 397–400; 2, 383–6; 6(2), 511–14 and 520–3; for the transliteration of Rumeli Etrakinun Koyun Adeti Hukmi (The Decree on the Number of Sheep of the Turks in Rumelia), see also Robert Anhegger and Halil ⁄nalcık, Kanunname-i Sultan-i Ber Muceb-i Örf-i Osmani II. Mehmed ve II. Bayezıd Devirlerine Ait Yasakname ve Kanunnameler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1956), 39–40; for the transliteration of Kanunname-i Kiptiyan-i Vilayet-i Rumeli (The Law of the Gypsies of Rumelia), see, for example, Ömer Lütfi Barkan, XV. ve XVI. Asırlarda Osmanlı ⁄mparatorluæunda Zirai Ekonominin Hukuki ve Mali Esasları: Kanunlar, Vol. 1 (Istanbul: ⁄stanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1945), 249–50. English translations of these regulations with their facsimiles and transliterations are also available in Faika Çelik, “Gypsies in the Orbit of Islam: The Ottoman Experience (1450–1600)” (MA Thesis, McGill University, 2003), 94–120. In subsequent citations of these laws, I will quote only from Akgündüz. 19 For further detail on the Mühimme Registers, see Uriel Heyd, Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 1552–1615: A Study of Firman According to the Mühimme Defteri (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960); Halil ⁄nalcık, “Ottoman archival materials on Millets,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Vol. II (New York and London: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1982), 438–49. 20 Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration around Sixteenth-century Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22. 21 Ibid. 22 Most of them were recorded by a court shadow master, Nazif Efendi, at the end of the nineteenth century. Metin And, Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theater (Ankara: Dost Yayınları, 1979), 61 and Necmi Erdoæan, “Devleti ‘idare etmek’: Maduniyet ve düzenbazlık,” Toplum ve Bilim, 83(1999–2000): 22. 23 Bronislaw Geremek, “The Marginal Man,” in Medieval Callings ed. Jacques Le Goff, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 352. 24 Ibid., 360–2.

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25 MD 7 (I), 30.66. For a similar complaint see also MD 7 (I), 52.100. 26 This expression was used frequently in the Ottoman documents to denote repeated criminals and known mischievous makers. For further information on the usage of term see, for instance, Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 27 Ginio, “Neither Zimmis, nor Muslims,” 129. 28 Ibid. Ginio is here citing Metin And, Karagöz, 69. 29 Ibid. 30 David M. Crowe, “Roma: The Gypsies,” V449. 31 A. Rafet Özkan, Türkiye Çingeneleri (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlıæı Yayınları, 2000), 8–9. 32 R. W. Halliday, “Some notes upon the Gypsies of Turkey,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 1(1922): 174. For a different version of this story, see Nazım Alpman, Bavka Dünyanın ⁄nsanları Çingeneler, 53. 33 For metaphors, idioms, and proverbs, I have mainly relied upon: Örnekleriyle Türkçe Sözlük (Ankara: Milli Eæitim Bakanlıæı, 1995–1996); Ömer Asım Aksoy, Atasözleri ve Deyimler Sözlügü, 2 vols (Istanbul: ⁄nkilap Kitabevi, 1989); M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Çingeneler,” ⁄slam Ansiklopedisi, Vol. III, 426; and Koçu, “Çingeneler,” in ⁄stanbul Ansiklopedisi, Vol. VII, 3999–4000. 34 Bart McDowell, Gypsies: Wanderers of the World (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1970), 145. 35 Examples would be “Gypsy shalwar” (Çingene valvarı) and “Gypsy fight” (Çingene kavgası). 36 Examples would be “a Gypsy cannot be a shepherd” (Çingenden çoban olmaz) and “a Gypsy who boasts of his courage is talking about his theft” (Vecaat arz ederken merd-i kıpti sirkatin söyler). 37 This saying is also rendered as follows: “In Turkey, there are sixty-six and a half nations.” See for instance Ingwar Svanberg, “Marginal Groups and Itinerants,” in Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey, 2 vols, ed. Peter Alford Andrews (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 1989), 1602. 38 Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 29. 39 G. L. Lewis and Ch. Quelquejay, “#ingane,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2, 40–1. 40 Robert Dankoff and Victor A. Friedman, “The earliest known text in Balkan (Rumelian) Romani: A passage from Evliya Celebi’s Seyahat-name,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Series V, 1(1991)1: 4. 41 Alexander G. Paspati, “Turkish Gypsies,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Old Series 1, (1888)1: 3. 42 As Marushiakova and Popov demonstrate based on the tax register of 1522–3, the most common occupations of the Gypsies of Rumelia pertained to music and they were often recorded as sazende, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 41. 43 See for instance MD 7 (I), 52.100; MD 5 (I), 35.186. See also Mustafa Akdaæ, Türk Halkının Dirlik ve Düzenlik Kavgası: Celali ⁄syanları (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1977), 150. 44 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Vol. 1 (Istanbul: ⁄kdam Matbaası, 1314/1896–1897), 646–9. Revat Ekrem Koçu, Tarihte ⁄stanbul Esnafı (Istanbul: Doæan Kitap, 2002), 39–46. 45 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Vol. 1, 645. 46 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Vol. 1, 561. 47 Robert Mantran, La vie quotidienne á Istanbul au siècle de Soliman le Magnifique (Paris: Hachette, 1990), 283. 48 Ahmed Kal’a (ed.), ⁄stanbul Ahkâm Defterleri: ⁄stanbul’da Sosyal Hayat, Vol. 2 (Istanbul: ⁄stanbul Aravtırmaları Merkezi, 1997), 238–9.

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49 For the decree see Ahmet Refik, Hicri On ⁄kinci Asırda ⁄stanbul Hayatı (1100–1200) (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1988), 198–9. For further information on the Fatih district see Halil ⁄nalcık, “Istanbul,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 4: 229. 50 Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 45. 51 See for instance Haim Gerber, “Position of women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600–1700,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 12(1980): 53–114; Ronald Jennings, “Women in early 17th century Ottoman judicial records: The Shari’a court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 18.1(1986): 165–83; and Elyse Semerdjian, “Sinful professions: Illegal occupations of women in Ottoman Aleppo, Syria,” Hawwa, I(2003): 59–85. 52 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 2, 512. 53 MD 12 (I), 228.344. 54 Faroqhi, “Counterfeiting in Ankara,” 135–7. 55 See for instance MD 5 (I), 40.208; MD 5 (I), 58.311; MD 5 (I), 127.715; MD 7 (I), 111.216. 56 BOA, MD 74. 73.229. I am grateful to Ismail Havim Altinöz for providing me with this document. 57 Faroqhi, “Counterfeiting in Ankara,” 135–7. 58 Quoted in Faroqhi, “Counterfeiting in Ankara,” 142. 59 Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. V.L. Menage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 261, 270, 305. 60 In Ottoman usage the haraç refers to: (1) cizye or poll tax levied upon non-Muslim subjects of the Empire; (2) a combined land–peasant tax imposed upon non-Muslim subjects farming the state-owned agricultural land; (3) tribute in general; (4) a tribute paid by a non-Muslim state to an Islamic state. Halil ⁄nalcık and Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Vol. I, xivii; Cengiz Orhonlu, “Kharadj,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 4, 1053–5. This term (haraç) was usually employed instead of cizye until the sixteenth century. In later documents, however, “cizye or cizye-i ver‘i” was the most common word for poll tax. Halil ⁄nalcık, “Djizya,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2: 562–6. 61 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 1, 397. 62 E.M. Verifgil, “XVI. Yüzyılda Rumeli Eyaletindeki Çingeneler,” Türk Dünyasi Aravtırmaları Dergisi, 15(1981): 129–35. For further information on Müsellems see Fatma Müge Göçek, “Müsellem,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 7: 665. 63 Verifgil, “XVI. Yüzyılda Rumeli Eyaletindeki Çingeneler,” 15(1981): 129–35. 64 Halil ⁄nalcık, “The nature of traditional society,” in The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy, ed. Halil ⁄nalcık (Variorum Reprints: London, 1978), 44. 65 R.W. Halliday, “Some notes upon the Gypsies of Turkey,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 1(1922): 168. 66 Önder Kaya, “Cellat Mezarlıæının Cellatı Olmak,” in VIII. Eyüp Sultan Sempozyumu Tebliæler, Vol. III (Mayıs 7–9, 2004) (Istanbul: Eyüp Belediyesi, 2004), 328–33. 67 G. Alexander Paspati, “Memoir on the Language of the Gypsies, As Now Used in the Turkish Empire,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 7(1862): 146. 68 Abdülaziz Bey and Osmanlı Adet, Merasim ve Tabirleri: ⁄nsanlar, ⁄nanıvlar, Eælence, Dil, Vol. 2, ed. Kazım Arısan and Duygu Arısan Günay (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1995), 368. 69 For this view see Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria (New York: P. Lang, 1997), 22; idem, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 33–4; Ginio, “Neither Muslims nor Zimmis,” 119–20. 70 Kemal Karpat, “The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the Middle East,” in Ethnicity, Pluralism and the State in the Middle East, ed. Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 39–40. 71 Ibid., 37.

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72 Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria, 22; idem, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 47. 73 Metin Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government 1550–1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 14. 74 On this question compare for instance M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Çingeneler,” ⁄slam Ansiklopedisi, Vol. III, 423; Mithat Sertoælu, Resimli Osmanli Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: ⁄stanbul Matbaasi, 1958), 68–9; Verifgil, “XVI. Yüzyılda Rumeli Eyaletindeki Çingeneler,” 15(1981): 129–35; ⁄smail Havim Altınöz, “Osmanlı Toplumunda Çingeneler,” Tarih ve Toplum, 137(May 1995): 27; idem, “Osmanlı Toplum Yapısı ⁄çinde Çingeneler,” Türkler, Vol. X (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Yayınları, 2002), 429–30; Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, 35. 75 Donald Edgar Pitcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 136–8 and map XXVII; Metin Kunt, Sancaktan Eyalete: 1550–1650 Arasında Osmanlı Ümerası ve ⁄l ⁄daresi (Istanbul: Boæaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1978), pp. 16, 18. 76 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 2, 512–13. 77 Ibid. See also Sertoælu, Resimli Osmanli Ansiklopedisi, 68–9. 78 Karpat, 45. 79 Gökbilgin, 421; Verifgil, 128; Lewis and Quelquejay, 40. 80 Stanford Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 1, Empire of the Gazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 152. Shaw does not explain when the Gypsies were attached to the Armenian millet nor does he cite any source. 81 Selahi Sonyel, Minorities and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 1993), 45. 82 Yavuz Ercan, Kudüs Ermeni Patrikhanesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1988), 15–17. 83 ⁄smail Havim Altınöz, “Osmanlı Toplumunda Çingeneler,” 27. 84 In my previous studies I have evaluated this phenomenon as an administrative segregation. I owe my deepest gratitude to Dana Sajdi for discussing this issue repeatedly and directing me toward this analysis. For my previous views on the subject see Faika Çelik, “Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire,” Studies in Contemporary Islam, 5.1–2(2003): 161–82; idem, “Exploring Marginality in the Ottoman Empire: Gypsies or People of Malice (ehl-i fesad ) as viewed by the Ottomans,” European University Institute Working Papers. No. 2004/39. 85 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 1, 398. 86 Semerdjian, “Sinful professions,” 70. 87 Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (London: Saqi, 1999), 34. 88 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 1, 397. 89 MD 6 (II), 1426, 338–9. For further information on müsellems see Göçek, “Müsellem,” 665. 90 Verifgil, “XVI. Yüzyılda Rumeli Eyaletindeki Çingeneler,” 135–6. 91 I am thankful to Virginia Aksan for suggesting, as the external reader of my MA thesis, that I incorporate this point into my analysis. 92 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 6 (2), 512. 93 Ibid., 513. The kanun reads “Ve müslüman çingeneleri kafir çingeneleri ile göçüb konıcak ve ihtilat edicek kınanub tedib olundukdan sonra kafir çingeneleri resmin eda ederler.” 94 Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 1, p. 398. 95 For haraç see 59ff. The term ispençe refers to a customary tax imposed upon adult non-Muslim subjects. The Ottoman bureaucracy considered it a poll tax paid to the timariot. The origin of the term goes back to pre-Ottoman Serbia where it was levied

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96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

as a poll tax paid to a feudal lord. Thus, the Ottomans maintained this practice and included it in timar for revenue. Halil ⁄nacık, “Ispendje,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, 4: 211. Kesm or kesim refers to: (1) a fixed or agreed price; (2) a kind of tax paid instead of övür (tithe). The term resm here refers to due taxes. Mehmet Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüæü (Istanbul: Millî Eæitim Basımevi, 1946–1956), Vol. 2, 248–9; Vol. 3, 28–9. Ginio, “Neither Muslims nor Zimmis,” 130. Ibid. Ibid., 130–1. George Soulis, who works on Balkan Gypsies during the period of Byzantine and Venetian rule, demonstrates that Gypsies were obliged to pay a special poll tax under the Venetians. Quoted in ibid., 131. Quoted in ibid. Ibid. See for instance Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 6 (2), 520–3. Ibid. See especially articles 1, 3 and 4. Ginio, “Neither Muslims nor Zimmis,” 134. Ibid. In Turkish, kalburcu, someone who makes and sells sieves or screens. See the kanuns referred to in this study and MD 7 (I), 111.216 and MD 12 (I), 372.599. Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, Vol. 2, 384; Vol. 6 (2), 513. Indeed, not only the movements of the Gypsies, but also the movements of other nomadic groups were restricted as a result of the same considerations. See for instance Paul Lidner’s Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington, IN: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1983). MD 6 (I), 108.903. MD 7 (I), 481.1010. See for instance MD 7 (I), 110.215; MD 7 (I), 110.216; MD 7 (I), 402.836; MD 7 (III), 185.2344. See for instance MD 5 (I), 58.311; MD 5 (I), 256.1596; MD 6 (I), 312.569; MD 7 (I), 30.66. See for instance MD 5 (I), 35.186; MD 5 (I), 256.1596; MD 6 (I), 108.903; MD 7 (I), 30.66. Tayyib Gökbilgin, “Çingeneler,” 425. ⁄nalcık, “Istanbul,” 4: 229. Ahmet Refik, 198–9. Heyd, 120. Kal’a (ed.), Vol. 1, 332–3; Vol. 2, 238–9, 273–4, 392–3. See for instance MD 5 (1), 178.1088; MD 7 (1), 481.1010. For a comparison of the attitudes toward the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire and Europe see, for instance, Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 173–8; Barany, The East European Gypsies, 83–95.

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8 EMANCIPATED FEMALE SLAVES IN ALGIERS Marriage, property and social advancement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Fatiha Loualich

Talking about women is a way of challenging society, of dissecting its foundations with a view to understanding better how it works, its mechanisms and connections, and the process of analysing a corpus of archives offers a concrete approach to the issues being studied. Of course, the data available for any specific group of women depends on their class, wealth and status. While quantities of data exist for elite women, whose menfolk were in the senior official, military and ulama classes, and some material may be found for middle-ranking women belonging to the class of craft guilds and merchants, data for subaltern women is scarce and brief. Nonetheless, despite the scarcity of the sources, by talking about these women it is possible to bring a fairly large proportion of them out of anonymity. In trying to classify women in general, significant differentiations emerge, for example, the category of slave women and the category or subcategory of emancipated women. The latter is a small group and the archive records are few and far between. Yet, this sub-category of women is especially interesting on account of its status. Indeed, such women are neither slaves nor free but occupy an equivocal and ambiguous position. Our investigation will focus on this group of emancipated slave women. We will examine how they took their place in history, as they provide us with a version of society that is different, discrete and complex. Moreover, by tackling the issue of emancipated women and their relationship to property, we will immediately enter the history of detail and the particular by analysing remarkable information about individual lives and personal experience. The scale of observation is the smallest possible, enabling us to make out individual strategies and personal paths. This small-scale analysis makes it possible to reconstitute lives. In this way, furthermore, fragments of experience may provide access to the social and symbolic logic appertaining to the group, or to wider society.1

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Sources and approaches Our corpus of documents consists of the notarial deeds of Algiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such documents exist from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries but the period selected for this study is the richest in terms of the quantity and diversity of the material. We have constructed our account using a sample of notarial deeds that we assembled from the archives of the Mahakim Shar‘iyya of Algiers.2 Our sample contains nearly a thousand deeds relating to slaves and emancipations: deeds of purchase and sale of slaves, deeds of emancipation, of marriage and repudiation, deeds recording property, declarations of ownership, acknowledgements of debts and so forth.3 Our sources are records of everyday life for which there is no substitute. Notaries’ archives, for instance, recount key moments in people’s lives, recording events, fragments and snippets of people’s lives as they happened. The documents mark the various phases of a person’s life, dating and preserving significant moments for posterity. However, finding out about emancipated slave women through notaries’ archives is a difficult task for two reasons. First, these archives are very fragmented and second they only rarely concern themselves with this social category. Nonetheless, they are indispensable as they can be interpreted to reveal relational, emotional, economic and social material, providing both an overview of society and also the fine detail of everyday life.

Slavery in Algiers In general, the emancipated slave followed a path which consisted of several distinct stages: slave, emancipated slave, servant. These were people in search of an identity, of a free status. Where did they come from, what were their origins and how did they arrive at their condition? To answer these questions we will first attempt a brief historical overview of this population. The numbers of slaves in the Regency of Algiers grew or dwindled according to time and circumstance.4 Slaves were identified as either white or black, and a clear distinction was made between the two categories. Although slaves were the property of their masters in the most absolute sense of the word, in Algiers they lived in physically less miserable conditions than most Muslims, as slavery was patriarchal in nature.5 After being bought, slaves became the private property of the buyer, who could sell, use, or donate them,6 or include them in his assets. In this way, slaves were part of the inheritance to be bequeathed to a person’s heirs, sometimes over several generations. We found several cases where slaves appeared in probate inventories.7 The sharing of slaves was a source of many complex disputes.8 Most of the black slaves arrived in Algiers with the regular caravans that crossed the Sahara and which connected the main African cities including Algiers to the south Saharan trading centres. This traffic was considerable in the sixteenth century, dwindling somewhat by the eighteenth century, and only ending in the

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late nineteenth century. Thousands of black slaves arrived in the countries of the Maghreb every year, perhaps amounting to about 2 million each century.9 The Saharan towns of Ouargla and Touggourt10 served as staging posts for this traffic and the Saharan caravan trade was in the hands of great merchants specializing solely in slaves.11 It seems that certain tribes from the south of Algeria, unable to pay their tribute in cash, paid it in men; thus some of the black slaves arrived in Algiers as, for example, the annual tribute under an agreement of 1552 between the government and the Shaykhs of Ouargla and Touggourt.12 All the sources are unanimous on the domestic nature of black slavery in the main cities of the pre-colonial Maghreb.13 Indeed, the black slave played almost the same role all round the Mediterranean.14 Having a slave was not indicative of luxury; even reasonably well-off families had slaves and their number was determined by the owner’s rank and social status. The Dey might have up to 40 slaves,15 a Bey up to 17, a head of a guild might have 6 slaves, a craftsman or merchant up to 4.16 In these specific cases, the slave was associated with the function or rank rather than the business acumen of his master. White slaves had different origins. In the Ottoman period, Algiers was the capital of privateering and, as well as the hub of the traditional traffic in black slaves from the south, was home to a large number of white slaves. In the midsixteenth century there were some 30,000 white slaves of all nationalities,17 though most were Spanish and Italian.18 White slaves might be both men and women, children as well as adults. Obtained by privateering, white slaves, generally Christians, stayed in the three prisons in Algiers before moving on to the Badistan or slave market.19 Slaves were auctioned in public, their good qualities and professions being called out aloud, along with the prices offered. The Government took one eighth of the price and had the right of pre-emption in the sale. Buying a white slave was a kind of speculative investment. Ransoms were an important source of income for both the Treasury20 and private investors. For example ‘Ali Pitchin, head of the guild of corsairs in the mid-seventeenth century, had his own prison that could hold 800 slaves.21 Algiers soaked up a large number of white slaves. This category of slaves has acquired a mythical dimension and its significance has commonly been misunderstood. Apart from certain singular and exceptional individuals, the vast majority were galley slaves, ordinary building workers or domestic servants, such as the water carrier who spent his days plying his trade among the fountains and streets of Algiers.22 Yet, as it grew in number, the white slave population came to include not only many nationalities but also many with technical skills. The technical skills of white slaves, as of renegades and converts, contributed to making them an irreplaceable labour force. The prices of white and black slaves reflected their different potential; our data enabled us to chart both the market rates and their fluctuations. One example concerns an estate belonging to an important sixteenth-century merchant. In September 1596 the estate had to be divided up between the heirs, but first debts had to be deducted, and the documents quote prices for both white and black slaves. 202

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The estate’s debts included: the purchase of a white slave at the price of 700 dinars for the merchant’s eldest son, following a promise made when the son’s marriage contract was signed; two black slaves, part of the arrears of his wife’s dowry, at the price of 350 dinars; one white slave stipulated in the marriage contract of his second son at the price of 700 dinars.23 A century later, the price of black slaves had dropped considerably. Marriage contracts drafted in the late eighteenth century set the prices of black Sudanese slaves in the dowries of wives at between 30 and 40 dinars.24 In contrast to white slaves, blacks were not ransomed or repatriated; the vast majority were used as servants for domestic chores, or as objects of luxury, especially concubines. The slave had no essential indicators of belonging or identity, such as kinship, lineage, surname or indication of ancestry: ‘son of’. They were denied these identity markers.25 The slave had no name, and lacked this symbolic emblem that is still the main marker in our social makeup. For a slave it was difficult to fill in the resulting gaps since parenthood was not merely biological, but also political and economic, as well as social and cultural.26 Once emancipated, the slave could achieve a certain level of social advancement and improve his financial position; in people’s minds, however, he would always be part of his master’s property, his skin colour being the only vague indication of his origin. When calling him by name, reference would always be made to his former owners; the prefix ‘emancipated by’ becoming a part of his identity. Through our data we observed in Algiers a high proportion of women slaves.27 This noticeable presence was the result of the high demand for female labour; in the cities, black women were particularly sought after as domestic servants, to be given as a dowry for a newly married woman, or as concubines.28 In general, women were needed in the home more as domestic workers than as concubines. This is confirmed by all the deeds of purchase of slaves which contain the following stipulation: that the female slave be fit for service, to work as a servant (hence for a specific function).

The emancipated slave woman Black slaves had no right to be ransomed or repatriated but they could be emancipated; we now turn to examining the stages of the emancipation process. How did the change from one status to another work? What were the stages or transitions, and what were the efforts required to obtain this new status? Or, simply, what were the conditions for acquiring or building an identity, one of humanity’s innate aspirations (the social self )? In Islam, emancipation is a pious act and believers are strongly encouraged to free their slaves. As their lives neared their end, masters sometimes emancipated all their slaves. We found, for example, the case of a Bey who emancipated his seventeen slaves.29 Others preferred to put their affairs in order before a journey or pilgrimage by emancipating all their slaves. This was so since, quite aside from its duration, any pilgrimage was an adventure (shipwreck, accident, sickness, etc.), 203

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from which there was no guarantee of return, and slaves left in limbo while their masters were absent were often the subject of disputes. Many slaves were thus able to regain their freedom during the lifetime of their masters. Furthermore, concerned to carry out a devout act that would be rewarded in the next world, masters often emancipated their slaves in their wills. There were also specific Islamic injunctions regarding female slaves. A concubine with children had to be emancipated upon the death of her master. In fact, in accordance with the Quran and Sunna, she was no longer a slave as soon as her pregnancy was confirmed. Her children were also emancipated and, as soon as their paternity was established, the children of slave women acquired the same rights as the father’s heirs from marriages with free women. Converts and non-Muslims also emancipated slaves; our inventory contains several deeds of this kind.30 We came across several emancipation deeds drawn up by renegades (‘alâj-s’) and by Jews.31 The same applies to certain emancipated slaves; they themselves had slaves and emancipated them in turn.32 They repeated almost the same acts and deeds as their masters.33 The emancipated slaves in the city of Algiers formed themselves into a separate community, a closed community: the emancipated slaves bore witness, and provided guarantees and support for one another; they acted as guardians for marriages of emancipated women, relying on each other as a form of solidarity. There was also a clear tendency for them to marry within their group. In order to measure the scale of this endogamy, we can refer to the extant deeds of marriage and repudiation. We have also observed, furthermore, that emancipated slaves of the same master married one another and bore witness for one another, indicating that they had formed a kind of solidarity among themselves. Traditions grew up within the group and solidarity in everyday life developed into bonds of various kinds.34 In terms of space, emancipated slaves were dispersed and continued to refer to the spatial constructs of their former masters. The community’s affairs were run by a head of guild known as qa ’id al- ‘abid, or shaykh al- jama‘a; who might also play the role of mediator between the community and wider society. The emancipated slave often reincarnated his former servile status, especially as in everyday life he carried out the same roles and tasks as the slave. Emancipated women were domestic servants or masseuses in the public baths, while the men worked as whitewashers of houses (c.f. the epithet ‘Algiers the White’), labourers or basket weavers. There were other privations: the emancipated slave had no relationship to space, no link to the city. The deeds drawn up for or concerning emancipated slaves never contained any spatial references. This absence of a spatial relationship with the city identified emancipated slaves as being under the protection of their former masters, the relationship between master and emancipated slave reproducing the old relationship between master and slave. The emancipated slave often became a servant of his former master.35 This population had no fixed abode; many lived in the Moorish cafés and fondouks.36 As for the women, several female emancipated slaves did not leave their masters’ homes. In some cases, even if freed women married, a clause was inserted in the marriage 204

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contract stating that: the husband should not oblige her to leave the home of her mistress or master without her consent.37 This clause demonstrates that there really was a bond of guardianship between the master and the emancipated woman and for most emancipated slaves this served as their social and economic identity.

Social integration, financial advancement Our survey enabled us to make the following observations: the demand for female slaves was higher than for male ones and many more women were emancipated than men. In our body of documents, out of 161 emancipation deeds, 31 referred to men and 130 to women.38 We also noted several deeds in which owners declared that they had male and female slaves and that the emancipation concerned the women only.39 Women also appeared to have had certain advantages in terms of social advancement; emancipated women who had as slaves belonged to the wealthier social classes married emancipated men of their own station. This rule was strictly observed.40 Several emancipated women whose masters were senior officials or wealthy people married freeborn men.41 Freed women were able to break through the restrictions of the closed community of emancipated slaves and gain access to the wider world. It was rarely so for freed men.42

Emancipated slaves and their relationship to property As a general observation, we may say that emancipated women were relatively better off than their male counterparts.43 The question is: what means did they use to gain access to property? According to the few deeds we found about property belonging to emancipated women, it seems they acquired it as gifts from their former masters, and often from bequests where the master or mistress set aside one-third of their property in their wills for their emancipated slaves.44 Concubines were sometimes undeclared legal wives and when the inheritance was being divided up, would appear, accompanied by witnesses of a marriage that had taken place but had not been registered. In such a case the qadi would often grant a dowry for the wife. In particular, a large number of emancipated women acquired property by means of a waqf (charitable endowment). In certain cases the property was quite considerable.45 Of gifts, bequests in wills, and property endowed under a waqf the latter was the most common.46 We found several cases of emancipated women acquiring property by means of the institution of the waqf. Protectionist masters opted for this form.47 They endowed their property, which might include houses, shops, orchards and so forth as a waqf, giving their emancipated slaves and their descendants the right to benefit.48 Sometimes emancipated women who married free men, often rich in cash, acquired property and endowed it as a waqf, stipulating the couple as the first beneficiaries.49 For example, one emancipated woman who owned an orchard, possibly acquired through a gift, endowed her property to designated 205

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beneficiaries under a waqf according to the Hanafi rite: her husband and her adopted son and their descendants in equal shares.50 Although acquisitions obtained by purchase on the market were rare, we found two noteworthy cases: one emancipated woman who bought a bread oven and one who bought a house.51 The samples from our research reveal a clear difference between the fortunes of women and men.52 We observed that the women were in a stronger position. They owned not only real estate and movable property but also handled a lot of cash.53 Emancipated women were much wealthier than their male counterparts, in both cash and real-estate. We found more women who registered property under a waqf after acquiring it; moreover, a relatively high proportion of husbands made declarations that the couple’s property belonged to their wives. Although fortunes were rare, a few emancipated women became wealthy and were registered as owners of several properties; these were not only donations and bequests, but also included property bought on the open market. In July 1693, for example, an emancipated woman bought a house in an auction by the bayt al-mâl [public treasury] for the price of 2,800 dinars; the purchase took place in the presence of her husband who declared that the house was his wife’s property, and that he had no entitlement to it. In November 1698, she endowed the property under a waqf in accordance with the Hanafi rite, designating the couple as the first beneficiaries.54 Emancipated women figure quite prominently in the registers of the bayt al- mâl; we noted several probate inventories for women.55 In conclusion, our research has enabled us to describe life-paths for emancipated women, which were contrary to the usual assumption of continued servility, destitution or prostitution. We found emancipated women searched for integration by social advancement: marriages outside their own community to men well placed in the social hierarchy. Also available to some women was an accumulation of wealth through access to property. Emancipated women did in fact enjoy a certain degree of social mobility and advancement facilitated by Islamic law.

Notes 1 J. Revel, L’histoire au ras du sol [preface], in G. Levi, Le Pouvoir au village: histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1989, p. 12. 2 Archives of the Mahakim Shar‘iyya of Algiers. This is part of the Ottoman collection, comprising three series: the Beylik records (property archives), the Bayt al-Mâl records (public treasury) and the Mahakim Shar‘iyya (Shar‘iyya courts) deeds. The latter is composed of the various deeds registered and authenticated before the qadis of Algiers, who sat in the two mahkama: the Maliki mahkama and the Hanafi mahkama. In the event of a major dispute, these two authorities appealed to the council (al-majlis al-‘ilmi) of the Great Mosque of Algiers, which acted as a court of appeal. Disputes and issues not resolved by the two mahkama were referred to this authority which sat every thursday in the Great Mosque of Algiers. The three legal institutions worked in close cooperation with one another. The deeds produced by these three authorities were marriage and repudiation contracts, deeds of inheritance and succession, wills, donations, acknowledgements of debts, waqf endowment deeds, purchase and sale agreements, deeds for emancipating slaves and so forth. Probate inventories were

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3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

registered with the Bayt al-Mâl. To avoid repetition, we shall use the following abbreviations: National Archives of Algiers (N A Algiers), Ottoman Collection (O C), Mahakim Shar‘iyya (M Sh). The Mahakim Shar‘iyya deeds are drafted in Arabic in a restrained and learned style, and reading them requires a good mastery of the legal concepts concerned. The documents relating to emancipations contain a wealth of data, although they are fragmented and scattered among the various boxes of the collection. Browsing through the collection and making a systematic inventory of the deeds in our category involved a considerable amount of work. We were able to draw up an exhaustive and representative inventory and the data we gathered amounted to a sample of deeds that we judged to be sufficient to establish out hypotheses. The initial result of our work was the production of this inventory as a research tool. The corpus of archives used in this study was put together from the following boxes: B.3, 110 deeds of emancipation. B.14/1, deeds of emancipation. B.19/1, deeds of marriage and divorce. B.37/1, deeds of emancipation. B.45/2 deeds of emancipation. B.46/2, deeds of marriage. B.53, dossier No. 5, 94 deeds of emancipation in records 1731–1848. B.58, deeds 147 to 172, deeds of emancipation. B.59, 1 to 83, deeds of emancipation. B.65, 66, 67, dossiers of deeds of sale and purchase of slaves and of emancipation. B.74/75, deeds [103–40]: purchase and sale of slaves. B.80/81, dossiers of deeds of emancipation, plus deeds of marriage and repudiation. B.83 wills of emancipation, deeds of marriage and repudiation. B.89, dossier No. 2, deeds of emancipation. B.114/115, deeds of marriage and repudiation. A large number of deeds regarding slaves: emancipation, marriage and repudiation, are scattered among the various boxes, notably the following: 17, 37, 78, 84/85/ 86, 146/147. Probate inventories are kept in the records of the Bayt al-Mâl [public treasury]. The Regency of Algiers (1671–1847) was ruled by the Dey. Initially under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan, by the nineteenth century the Deys had become virtually independent. A. E. H. Ben Mansour, Algiers, 16th and 17th century – Journal of Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, évêque d’Afrique, Paris, CERF, 1998, p. 125. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, 17, deed No. 93. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, B/53, dossier No. 2, deeds Nos. 28, 33, 34. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 53, dossier No. 5, deed No. 8. M. Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco (Basingstoke), 1999, p. 107. M. Emerit, Les liaisons terrestres entre le Soudan et l’Afrique du Nord au 18ème siècle et début du 19ème siècle, Extract from the work of the Institut de Recherches Sahariennes, [IRS], T.XI, 1954, [pp. 29–47], p. 39. N A Algiers, M Sh, box 74/75, deeds [103–40], purchase and sale of slaves. A. E. H. Ben Mansour, Algiers, 16th and 17th century – Journal of Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, évêque d’Afrique, Paris, CERF, 1998, p. 120. M. Ennaji, Serving the Master, p. 9. A. Stella, ‘L’esclavage en Andalousie à l’époque moderne’, in Annales ESC, No. 1, January–February, 1992, [pp. 35–65], p. 46. V. De. Paradis, Tunis et Alger au 18ème siècle, Tunis, Bouslama, 1980, p. 114. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 80/81, dossier No. 10, deed No. 8. See the famous text of Diego De Haedo in which he lists the nationalities making up the ‘incredible people of Algiers’: renegade Muscovites, Vlachs, Bulgars, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Scots, English, Irish, Flemish, Burgundians, French, Navarese, Aragonese, Catalans, Majorcans, Sardinians, Corsicans, Sicilians, Calabrians, Neapolitans, Romans, Tuscans, Genoese, Venetians, Greeks, Cretans, and so forth. see B. Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah : l’histoire extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe– XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1989, p. 147.

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18 H. D. De. Grammont, Histoire d’Alger sous la domination Turque (1515–1830), Paris, Bouchène, 2002, p. 124. 19 V. De. Paradis, Tunis et Alger au 18ème siècle, Sindbad, 1983, p. 153. 20 A. Devoulx, Registre des prises maritimes, Algiers, Bastide, 1872. 21 P. Boyer, Alger en 1645 d’après les notes du R. P. Hérault. Introduction to these notes in Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 17, 1974, pp. 19–41, 29. 22 Lesieur de Rocqueville, Relations des mœurs et du gouvernement des Turcs d’Alger, Paris, Olivier de Varennes, 1675. 23 N A Algiers, F O, M Sh, box 88, deed No. 9, 1596. 24 N A Algiers, F O, M Sh, box 17, deed No. 57, in 1786, box 59, deed No. 117, in 1795, box 78, deed No. 90, in 1778. 25 F. Héritier, ‘Articulations et substances’, in l’Homme, No. 154/155, April–September 2000, pp. 21–38, p. 34. 26 L. Dumont, Introduction à deux théories d’anthropologie sociale. Groupe de filiation et alliance de marriage, La Haye, Mouton, 1971, p. 31. 27 T. Shuval, La ville d’Alger vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, CNRS, 2002, p. 130. 28 V. De. Paradis, Tunis et Alger au 18ème siècle, p. 250. 29 N A Algiers,O C, M Sh box 80/81, Dossier No. 10, deed No. 8. 30 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 82, deed No. 76. 31 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 58, deed No. 161. 32 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 53, dossier No. 5, deed No. 50. 33 F. Loualich, ‘Les affranchies dans la ville of Algiers, fin du 18ème – début du 19ème siècle d’après les archives des Mahakim Shar‘iyya’, in L’AHROS, No. 25, 2002, (pp. 181–96), p. 191. 34 G Levi, Le pouvoir au village, p. 211. 35 F Loualich, ‘Les esclaves noirs à Alger {fin du 18ème- début du 19ème siècle]. De l’esclave à l’affranchi, vers une relation d’allégeance’, in MEFRM – 115–2003, 1, pp. 513–22, 521. 36 P. Boyer, La vie quotidienne à Alger à la veille de l’intervention Française, Hachette, 1963, p. 182. 37 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 59, deed No. 46. 38 F Loualich, ‘Les affranchies de la ville of Algiers fin du 18ème– début du 19ème siècle, à partir des archives des des Mahakim Shar’yya’, in L’AHROS, No. 25–2002, (pp. 181–96), p. 182. 39 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 2, deeds No. 9. 40 F. Loualich, ‘Les affranchies de la ville of Algiers fin du 18ème– début du 19ème siècle, à partir des archives des des Mahakim Shar’yya’, p. 188. 41 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 89, dossier No. 4, deed No. 2. 42 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 80/81, deed No. 136. 43 Some white slave converts [‘alâj-s], both men and women, made their fortunes quickly; their access to property is attested by deeds registered with Algiers notaries from the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the case of women, we observe that several owned considerable property, for example, one woman was the owner of a baths. 44 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 59 dossiers No. 5, deed No. 50. 45 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 39, deed No. 53, in 1709. 46 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 121, deed No. 25, in 1652, a house was endowed to an emancipated slave. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 88, deed No. 21, in 1767, a woman owning a large two-storey house and a maisonnette, endowed her property in favour of these slaves: the maisonnette to her emancipated slave woman Rûqaya and her descendants, the large house to her three emancipated slaves: Muhammad, Rûqaya and Fatima but not to their descendants. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 39, deed No. 14, in 1783, a woman endowed her house to her husband and emancipated slave.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53

N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 19/1, deed No. 25. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 9/2, deed No. 34, in 1038. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 19/1, deed No. 22, in 1693. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 6/2, deed No. 34. N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 74/75, deed No. 64, and box 19/1, deed No. 22. T. Shuval, La ville d’Alger vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle, p. 130. F. Loualich, ‘Alger fin du XVIIIe début du XIXe siècle, les affranchies dans les deeds notariales’, in L’AHROS, No 25, 2002, pp. 181–96. 54 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 19/1, deed No. 22. 55 N A Algiers, O C, M Sh, box 83, deed No. 14.

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Part V EUROPEAN SUBALTERNS

9 “MAKING IT” IN PRE-COLONIAL TUNIS Migration, work, and poverty in a Mediterranean port-city, c.1815–1870 Julia Clancy-Smith

Introduction During the early morning hours of Ramadan 1248/1833, the sixty Christian Neapolitan servants (mustakhadimin) in the Tunisian bey’s inner palace service slumbered soundly – too soundly – after a busy night of preparing food and serving their masters, the mamluks. Heedless of the nawba (military band) announcing the final meal before dawn, the hapless servants only awoke when the day’s fast was announced.1 Infuriated by this dereliction of duty, the head mamluk ordered the Neapolitans be punished with the bastinado. While those who were fast-footed enough managed to escape, taking refuge at their consulate, others were less fortunate; they received a brutal beating resulting in severe injuries. Incensed, the Neapolitan consul immediately sought out the ruler, Husayn Bey (reigned 1824–1835), to demand justice. A diplomatic crisis was in the making. The affair of the sleeping Neapolitans offers a window, albeit a narrow one, into the culture of servants and household service which in turn raises a larger set of questions about making a living in precolonial Tunisia. These particular Italians had originally arrived in the Regency as young captives. Freed in 1816, they had remained with their masters, the beys and mamluks, probably for want of other options. Indeed the servants were characterized at court and in the Arabic sources as children (al-mushashuat from the Spanish, muchachos) and therefore had been integrated into their palace households as fictive kin, although admittedly at an inferior rank. At the time of the incident, their status was that of salaried workers; but they were also Neapolitan subjects, and as such, under the diplomatic protection of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. After the ensuing diplomatic crisis was resolved, many of the Neapolitans left the palace to find work elsewhere. What kinds of employment possibilities awaited them?

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The incident raises intriguing questions about what kinds of work could be found in a preindustrial and precolonial port-city that was just on the cusp of a migratory surge. In 1800 some 2,000 “Europeans” resided permanently in Tunis, although who and what was a European remained somewhat fluid for much of the century. As the Neapolitans went out in search of new positions, the ranks of the Mediterranean immigrants in Tunisia expanded precipitously, in part the consequence of settler colonialism in French Algeria. It is difficult to obtain population figures for precolonial Tunisia since the first census was only conducted in 1906. A credible 1847 report put the total number of “Christians” at 9,400 of whom the Maltese numbered 6,000.2 In 1848, the English vice-consul counted 5,800 British subjects in Tunisia; the vast majority were Maltese, less than 200 were Greeks, and no more than 35 men, women, and children were natives of England. At mid-eighteenth century about sixty families were under French protection; some were French nationals while others were not. Estimates of the Italo-Sicilian population also vary widely; figures from 1870 claimed that at least 9,000 Italians resided permanently in the beylik to which another 2,000 seasonal workers – fishermen and sailors – should be added.3 By the 1870s the percentage of resident Europeans had doubled from 7–8 percent in 1839 to 15 percent or more of the capital city’s population. Most were concentrated in the Tunis region because it held – or was believed to hold – more employment promise than elsewhere. Making a living is at the core of the migratory experience – as both an incentive to leave home and calculation in relocating to one place and not another. However, labor migration to a preindustrial state challenges us to think about what kinds of work existed, how people found a job, and how employment recruitment operated. Work is never solely about wages, services, or gaining one’s daily bread but instead ensnares individuals and families in social webs. In precolonial Tunisia, work constituted a major mechanism for social insertion and was shaped by gender, class, religious affiliation, patron–client relations, and other elements.4 In recreating the process of “making a living,” I have chosen to consider “service sector” activities, particularly domestic service, because this form of work implicated Tunisians, other city-dwellers, and recent immigrant into reciprocal relationships. Nevertheless, the record for the precolonial era is extremely fragmented, particularly for the subsistence migrants; thus it is difficult to fully reconstruct the recruitment of labor and the organization of work whether in the service sector or not. In terms of conceptualization, this essay draws upon network theory to understand how various kinds of work insinuated immigrants into the Tunisian economy and society, while also gradually undermining those structures.5 Some networks were quite local and confined to a city quarter where inhabitants lived or worked together and thus shared common information circuits. Other social filaments, such as lineage networks, reached across the short span of water separating western Sicily and Malta from the Cap Bon; others forged by diplomatic or commercial exchanges stretched beyond the central Mediterranean 214

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to Algiers, Marseilles, Istanbul, or Paris. Finally, if “making it in Tunis” was the product of patronage, social networks, and serendipitous circumstances, failure to earn a livelihood and poverty – “down and out” – must also enter into the discussion. Of course, poverty is a relational concept whose cultural meanings and manifestations changed in the course of the nineteenth century and varied from community to community.6 Calamity inevitably befell families at the bottom of the social pecking order when breadwinners fell ill, fell afoul of the law, or employers died. Thus we conclude with a consideration of various kinds of adversity – unleashed by bad luck, the wrong decision or larger forces, such as epidemics – and its social consequences.

The structure of work in precolonial Tunisia, c.1830 Until the growth of state concessions to European investors during the 1870s, Tunisia’s economy did not afford many opportunities for large numbers of “outsiders” or even familiar strangers, such as the Maltese, Sicilians, and other island folk. Tunis counted at least seventy-five sina‘at (corporations or guilds) that remained fairly intact, although external economic pressures were building during the period. As was true elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, the guilds were close-knit; their members chose heads (amins), charged with ensuring quality by supervising producers as well as products.7 For example, shashiya (a red brimless cap worn by Muslim males) production, centered in Tunis and its satellite villages, represented a proto-capitalist industry that generated considerable revenues. A special suq in Tunis sold caps to retailers for distribution in the rest of the country, the Maghreb, and Ottoman empire – until cheaper, European shashiyas competed with the superior, but pricier, Tunisian headgear after 1850. However, the shashiya industry, like most artisanal enterprises, offered little or no work for outsiders. Other professions were dominated by specific religious or ethnic groups. Tunisian Jews monopolized tailoring and money lending, while porters and stevedores were recruited from the southern oases; the bakkals or retail grocers in Tunis were run by Djerbans which is still the case today in Tunisia – and in French cities, such as Paris. Women worked in a number of capacities, particularly in textile preparation or production, either at home or in village workshops tied to the manufacture of caps, carpets, and a wide array of woven items for household use. They also served feminine society as healers, midwives (qabla), beauticians, singers, dancers, and prostitutes. Among the more than fifteen hammams or bathhouses in Tunis, several were reserved exclusively for women which also provided work for female bathhouse attendants. Those particularly skilled in needlework held the respected status of mu`allima and taught household arts and handicrafts to girls.8 However, the guild system as well as the organization of work generally offered meager opportunities for unskilled immigrant women or men in many sectors of the urban economy. As importantly, owning property outright was, theoretically, not an option, although working land owned by Tunisian subjects was a possibility. Until the 1863 215

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Anglo-Tunisian convention, followed by the 1868 Italian–Tunisian treaty, both of which conferred property rights upon foreigners, Europeans theoretically could not acquire full title to land, buildings, or businesses. As was true in Izmir and Alexandria, however, Tunisian subjects and foreigners resorted to clever subterfuges to thwart restrictions on property-holding or transfers.9 In the 1870s, the demand for labor in the capital region soared due to European-directed infrastructural projects, such as telegraphs and railroads, which ironically worked to encourage Italian labor settlement in Tunisia.10 Only after 1885 did large numbers of immigrant European families acquire small plots of privately owned land, although by 1874 some 500 Maltese had acquired property of one sort or another.11 Nevertheless, some of these property-owners “got their start,” acquiring a bit of capital or securing patronage with the “right person” through earlier labors in the “service sector” which grew from mainly household employment to tavern or hotel work by the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

From domestic slaves to domestic servants: palace and elite household service In today’s global labor market, the study of domestic service is situated at the crossroads of several fields such as labor, family, and migration history and raises issues of class, race, ethnicity, and gender.12 As with other types of transnational labor, domestic service workers find employment abroad through networks and, once employed, construct new sets of networks while, at times, gradually losing contact with home-based links as prolonged absence and sheer distance take their toll.13 When gender is factored into the labor market in the contemporary Middle East, purely economic calculations are often tempered by other factors, such as job status which “weighed even more in influencing a woman’s choice of employment than it did a man’s.” For example, while Cairene maids tend to earn much more than teachers, domestic service is regarded as lower in status and thus less desirable.14 But do these patterns hold true for a preindustrial North African state in the era before colonialism? Did employment as servants in elite households bring some measure of empowerment for individuals and families? How did the service sector operate in general, and in what ways did it offer both employment and social positioning for newly arrived Mediterranean folk of humble status? Was this practice of employing Christian domestics unusual? Did it represent an older system in decline or the continuation of a certain culture of service among Tunisian elites? What does the service sector tell us about patronage and networks? Virtually ignored in studies of nineteenth-century Tunisia, domestic service was a form of labor extraction that juxtaposed individuals of different social ranks and sexes – and sometimes of different religions, races, and national origins – under the same roof. In her study of nineteenth-century Tunisian family life, Leila Temime Blili, observed that precolonial sources for reconstructing the social world of servants and domestic service are scanty at best, although wedding 216

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contracts from a later period provide some evidence. As was true elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, Tunisian marriage contracts might stipulate that the bride be provided with servants. Often recruited from impoverished families in the countryside, young girls were placed with socially superior households where they remained for years. Within extended kinship groups families that had fallen on bad times might place their young girls with wealthier relatives who, in exchange for household labor, would raise them, find suitable husbands, provide dowries, and eventually marry them off. Most of these arrangements were oral, although at times they assumed the form of written contracts registered with the qadi.15 While the preference for engaging indigenous girls from rural areas, or impecunious kin may have limited opportunities, still the sources suggest that domestic service represented one way of making a living for Mediterranean immigrants, although it was not without sexual dangers for women.16 We initiate our discussion of work with the beylical state which, if not the “only game in town,” was at least the “biggest game” for much of the precolonial period. The Husaynid dynasty (c.1705–1956) sat at the confluence of numerous intricate networks forged by kinship, patronage, revenue collection, public works, trade monopolies, and diplomacy, to name only a few. As a result, the single largest employer was the Tunisian state, court, and Husaynid family followed by Ottoman, European, or other merchants and traders whose ranks also included the consuls. Moreover, the various consulates functioned as employment bureaus in the double sense of the term since they furnished work to Tunisian translators, dragomen, and servants as well as operating as job placement agencies for proteges and nationals. It is quite possible that some of the wayward Neapolitan servants were subsequently hired by various European consulates since their training and experience acquired from years of serving the Husaynid elite would have made them particularly valuable. Not surprisingly, the Husaynid family and court directly employed hundreds of people and provided work to thousands more through their consumption of food stuffs, textiles, household goods, and so forth. Thus our consideration of the service sector begins here. The palace complex, known as the Bardo, was situated 5 kilometers outside the walls of Tunis in a stretch of land surrounded by gardens and fields.17 With each bey’s ascension to the throne, a new palace was constructed so that by the 1830s the Bardo assumed the character of a small enclosed town with a number of separate palaces as well as lodgings for slaves, servants, and mamluks, military barracks, vast kitchens, and the mahkama or tribunal. In addition to serving as home to a “vast array of people serving the needs of the ruling dynasty,” numerous guests and visitors from around the country were lodged there sometimes for extended periods of time. Around 1829, the Sardinian consul, Count Filippi, estimated that the complex contained about 800 people, although he could not have known with any certainty about the women’s quarters which were quite extensive. “The Bardo is occupied by the ruling family which owns a number of beautiful residential quarters, the rest of the area is occupied by the Mamluks and servants; the former number about 200, half of whom serve the princes by 217

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assuming different offices and responsibilities of the court, the remainder are divided into four companies and serve as the interior guards of the Bardo.”18 In addition, there were smaller, summer palaces and residences scattered along the coast from La Marsa to Hammam Lif which were tended by servants, retainers of diverse backgrounds, and slaves. Until 1816, when Lord Exmouth’s expedition to Tunis manumitted Christian slaves and ended the trade in Christian captives, the distinction between slave and servant at the Bardo was somewhat blurred. Christian slavery has been thoroughly treated by Valensi and Panzac, among others, and thus the intent here is not to revisit that subject but rather to consider earlier forms of coerced or forced labor cum domestic service to determine if long-term patterns endured.19 For the period just prior to 1816, the English traveler, Feise, provides tantalizing evidence on Christian slaves serving the Regency’s ruling class. In 1812 Feise calculated the number of Christian slaves in Tunis at around 2,000, a figure obtained from long-time European residents: “Christian slaves are very few in number at present owing to the English having lately ransomed the Sicilians and Greeks of the Ionian islands. Those in the situation of slavery are now Neapolitans and Sardinians because the Tunisians are now only at war with Sardinia and Naples.”20 While his calculations seem a bit high – Panzac’s careful study estimates the number at around 1,200 – Feise’s narrative sheds light upon possible cultural meanings attached to Christian slaves in household service. For the beys or the great mamluk households, they represented important social status markers: “As Christian slaves constitute a great part of Moorish grandeur, those who can afford to purchase the greatest number and keep them the best clothed are considered as the first among the grandees of the Principality.” According to Feise, Christian slaves cum servants were generally well treated since they were not only well nourished but also lavishly dressed in the Ottoman or “eastern style,” minus, of course, turbans reserved for Muslims. The clothing worn by the beys’ Christian servants continued to draw comment from Europeans; in the 1830s, a visitor at court declared that “the Christian domestics [in the bey’s service] wear the most ridiculous costume that one could imagine” – which suggests that the servants had retained their “eastern dress” and perhaps some of their significance as status indicators.21 What tasks did they fulfill in the earlier period? Again, Feise tells us that: “Many Christian slaves fill places of trust and those who labor seldom have heavier duties than watering and attending to a garden . . . Nor must we forget the poor obsequious Christian slave who stands with humble reverence behind his lordly master, holding his coffee cup and presenting him with Tobacco according as it may be required.”22 Outside the capital, Christians were employed in a number of occupations. For example, the secretary to the kahiya (governor) of the port of La Goulette was a Christian slave, probably due in part to linguistic abilities, while the Prime Minister had a number of slaves in service on his country estate near Utique twenty-two miles outside of Tunis.23 We do not know with any degree of certainty the immediate consequences of Exmouth’s expedition to Tunis upon the labor market, although the demise 218

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of raiding, which had transferred unfree labor from Mediterranean islands or southern Europe to North Africa, must have had repercussions in certain labor sectors in the Tunis region. In 1816, the Tunisian state lost some 900 captives – 300 Sardinians and 500 Neapolitans – most of whom were repatriated to Europe; among whom, presumably, there were not only individuals doing hard, forced labor in galleys, arsenals, or shipyards but also in household service.24 A few liberated slaves remained in Tunisia for want of other opportunities, the case of the remiss Neapolitan servants punished so cruelly in 1833. Moreover, several families residing in Tunis at mid-century were descended from freed Christian slaves manumitted over thirty years prior.25 In August 1841, Ahmad Bey abolished African slavery with the closing of the slave market in the Suq al-Birka in Tunis; several years later, the trade in enslaved persons was outlawed. As was true elsewhere, abolition did not mean that slavery disappeared – far from it. The traffic in female slaves for harem service persisted, although clandestinely and on a reduced scale; Greek, Georgian, or Circassian women slaves were often transported in Austrian vessels.26 As late as 1880, there are reports of enslaved African women in Tunis still being used in household service.27 On the other hand, Tunisian beys and notables had routinely manumitted slaves in large numbers to celebrate religious festivals, important family celebrations, such as marriages, or dynastic events. When the Baya Lalla Fatima died in 1827, “deeply regretted by all classes of people in the Regency, and above all, by the poor upon whom she showered gifts. Her last moments on earth were marked by an act of goodness which will honor her memory forever, the freeing of 500 black slaves.”28 At Husayn Bey’s death in 1835, 600 female and 200 male slaves were liberated; when Mustafa Bey died in 1837, hundreds of his African slaves were freed as well.29 Therefore, manumitted African slaves were constantly fed into the labor market. In Tunis, manumission often meant that Africans or those of African origins stayed with their masters, continuing to perform menial labor in households, workshops, or gardens. According to Temime, until 1846 domestic service was almost exclusively the domain of black slaves bought in the Suq al-Birka; wealthy families employed both black men and women to perform household tasks without apparently a sharply gendered allocation of work.30 In later notarial records, the category, ‘atiq (freed persons) was employed to designate domestics who were probably the children of emancipated slaves remaining with the family.31 As A. Largueche noted for the period after the 1840s, “freed [black] slaves swelled the lowest ranks of Tunisian society” probably increasing the pool of casual or unskilled labor.32 Enslaved or recently manumitted African slaves frequently showed up at the British consulate seeking refuge or work or both; in part this was due to the fact that the building was conveniently located for job-seekers near the “Sea Gate” (Bab al-Bahar) on one of the main squares in the capital, although surely information about Britain’s anti-slavery stance had entered into the local networks in this part of Tunis. In any case, the transformations discussed above raise questions about supplies of labor needed to run large, multigenerational 219

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households whose elite status was partially calibrated by the number of slaves or retainers. Finally, the 1833 affair of Neapolitans, as recorded by Ahmad Ibn Abi al-Diyaf, the bey’s secretary, sheds some light upon the cultural norms of the time governing the treatment of servants and slaves as well as the existence of contracts. In a conversation with Husayn Bey, the Neapolitan consul reminded the ruler that when the servants “were freed from slavery, they elected to remain in the country where they had been raised as paid workers; and an employer does not have the right to beat his employees . . . they could be fired before the expiration of the contract [nazila].” To which Husayn Bey testily responded: “The custom in our country permits beating servants.” A lively discussion ensued among the beys’ closest advisors over the permissibility of inflicting corporal punishment upon servants; opinion was divided. The bey’s secretary took the position that domestics such as the Neapolitans should not be ill-treated since they were ahrar (free).33 By the 1830s, the Neapolitans did not hold any monopoly over palace service. A source with precise knowledge of Tunisian society noted in 1835 that “the domestics and people in service are Neapolitans, Sardinians and Italians, most of them of modest social origins. They are all subordinate to the Bash-Kasak [i.e., master of the wardrobe] who is the Bey’s favorite.”34 This refers to Joseph Marie Raffo (1795–1862) who was appointed to the important position of bash kasak in 1825 by Husayn Bey. Raffo subsequently served as first interpreter to Husayn Bey and became Ahmad Bey’s (1837–1855) minister of foreign affairs. Raffo, like so many of his fellow “Europeans” originally hailed from modest origins but climbed the social ladder through connections to the palace with its multifarious networks. He was born in Tunis, the eleventh child of a Genoese artisan, Gian-Battista, who had been captured by corsairs in 1771. Raffo père was attached to the Husaynid court in his capacity as a watchmaker – which is not surprising given how inordinately fond the ruling elite was of clocks and watches. This connection would then explain son Joseph’s engagement while still young in palace service. Two other important ties were created by wet-nursing and marriage: Raffo was Ahmad Bey’s “milk brother” since Raffo’ mother had nursed the young prince; at the same time, one of Raffo’s sisters, Elena-Grazia, converted to Islam and was married to Mustafa Bey (1835–1837). A Sardinian subject, Raffo remained a Christian as he served five Muslim rulers. His residence at the Bardo was adorned with Catholic images and he served as the patron for the Church in Tunisia; in the 1830s he used his influence with the bey to have a new church constructed on the site of an ancient Trinitarian hospital.35 In turn, Raffo also employed Europeans of modest social origins as his servants. Among Raffo’s subordinates was a Maltese couple who, while unnamed in the sources, became the object of intense political interest, due to the wife’s alleged sexual misbehavior. In 1856, the English consul, Richard Wood, wrote to Raffo requesting his direct intervention: “I feel that I can ask you to handle this affair since it appears that wife and husband were previously in your service.”36 Thus is seen how ties of patronage centered upon the palace radiated 220

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out to subalterns who in turn forged their own patronage networks with those “below them.” British diplomatic sources demonstrate that not insignificant numbers of Maltese immigrants, who were British proteges, were employed as domestics in the bey’s palace.37 In 1838, the English vice-consul contacted Ahmad Bey, to plead in favor of “Giorgio Battista Bartolo, an English [i.e., Maltese] subject living in Tunis; he and his wife have rendered a certain number of services for the Bardo palace for years; he is asking for remuneration from the bey [Ahmad].”38 Taken together these clues suggest that newly arrived Mediterranean people were able to secure work as servants due to the persistence of the older practice of employing favored Christian captives in palace and other elite service.39 Moreover, the patronage ties created by serving, for example, as one of the bey’s male cooks, could ultimately lead to more glorious opportunities, particularly after Europeans were allowed to hold property. Philippe Béranger (1813–?) was one such individual. Originally from the Var, he arrived in Tunis around 1840 where he won an appointment as head chef to Ahmad Bey at the Bardo. Leaving the bey’s service, perhaps after Ahmad’s death in 1855, Béranger subsequently went into business in 1858. In association with François Pascal, his brother-in-law, he became the owner of the Hotel de Provence located in Tunis.40 Pascal, a French subject, who had also once served as chef to Ahmad Bey, served as the maitre d’hôtel. Pascal eventually went into business with a Neapolitan subject; together they invested in property near Sfax where they had planted olive and fruit trees. Eugène Bertrand, who had served the bey as a civil engineer, took over the management of the Hotel de Paris in 1864 which he later acquired as property.41

Domestic service and harem visits, 1835 and 1844 Thus far we have mainly discussed palace service with regard to male servants, slaves or retainers. What can be learned about the social universe of female servants or, prior to 1841, slaves? Due to the paucity of Arabic sources, we must rely upon European accounts. In 1835 and again in 1844, European women resident in Tunisia paid official calls upon the wives of the beys both at the Bardo and the summer palace in La Marsa. Their narratives reveal a world largely off limits to other Europeans (and to the historian due to the nature of the beylical sources). Mrs Berner, the widow of the Danish consul, had resided in Tunis for years; therefore, the 1835 account of her visit to the Bardo accompanied by female friends, is particularly valuable.42 She noted that a minister of Husayn Bey conducted the ladies as far as the second interior court of his harem where he took leave of his visitors: [A]t the double gate of the harem, two Moors kept watch; and after one of them had retired, a few minutes to announce us, he returned with the interpreter, an Italian lady, who invited us to follow her . . . from the 221

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place were we were seated, we could see into several other rooms where on the ground sat a great number of black and white female slaves, some gossiping, others engaged in various occupations. The numbers which I saw, from time to time, certainly exceeded a thousand.43 Lady Temple, the wife of Sir Grenville Temple, also visited the Bardo that same year, in 1835. Once again, she was consigned to the same Italian woman who acted as an interpreter and presented Lady Temple to “her Highness the Lillah Kabira [sic; Husayn Bey’s first wife] in a patio, adorned in the usual oriental style with fountains.” Moreover, she added some information regarding slave women’s duties in providing entertainment: We must not omit the mention of the indecent dance prevalent in female society through all Barbary. Many hours are passed by the women witnessing this dance performed by their slaves in the solitude of the harem. Christian ladies are never pressed to witness it as the Mooresses know it would give them a very, justly, great offence. It is performed openly at Jewish marriages, and such is the force of habits, however immoral, that European women of the lower sort, sometimes perform this dance with great zest.44 The two 1835 visits were followed in 1844 with another social call made by the womenfolk in the English consul’s family, including a Miss Smith, who provided the written account. This particular occasion was much more than a casual social event since, as Miss Smith noted, “we promised to give them [i.e., English consular officials] a faithful report of all that we saw and heard.” This time, however, the European ladies went to the summer palace in La Marsa whose harem appears to have been guarded by Black eunuchs, probably supplied to Tunisia from Egypt. “The black and white [female] attendants of whom there were many, placed napkins on our laps and handed us the refreshments.” On this occasion, the European and Tunisian women ventured together outside the palace where tents had been pitched near the beach so that the harem women could promenade in the company of their visitors. “Their black female attendants on such occasions are allowed to walk; I have counted more than fifty of them dressed in the gayest colours, attended with the Kaed el-dar, [i.e. the qa’id al-dar, a eunuch] passing through the olive groves and vineyards to the sea-side.”45 These accounts offer ethnographic details about the interior of the beys’ harems and the various persons in service. The first is that the English women appear to have been charged with counting the number of African slaves in the beys’ service – perhaps as part of Great Britain’s anti-slavery campaign, then directed at Tunisia. In addition, the mention of female slaves serving as entertainers for the harem women expands our understanding of the tasks assigned to slaves. The claim that “European women of the lower sort” performed dances deemed erotic at weddings or in public is equally intriguing and indicates that Lady Temple had 222

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either witnessed this spectacle herself, or more likely had heard about it from other upper-crust Europeans resident in Tunis. Finally, the “Italian woman” in the bey’s household who acted as an interpreter for guests suggests that there must have been a regular parade of European female visitors – otherwise a staff person would not have been necessary. We have no knowledge of who the Italian harem guide was but her presence was probably due to the fact that a fair number of Italians, particularly physicians – in addition to the mamluks of Italian origins – served in high-level capacities to the beys. Household employment sometimes resulted in disputes over wages or length of service. While more research is needed, it appears that some Christian women worked as wet-nurses for Muslim notables. In one case, serving as a wet-nurse entailed residing for months in the intimacy of one of the great families connected to the bey’s court. In this particular instance, reported in 1829 by the English consul, a Maltese woman “having suckled the child of a Mamluk [member of the court] according to agreement for 7 months, and the time being expired, but the Mamluk would not suffer her to quit the house, her husband applied at the [English] Consulate.” The husband wanted the consul to compel the notable to release his wife from employment as a wet-nurse so that she could rejoin her own family.46 After weeks of diplomatic exchanges, including appeals to the bey, the woman was allowed to return home; her back wages were paid to her husband. Wet-nursing in Tunisian culture established ties of fictive kinship and complex networks between families. Therefore, this incident raises larger questions regarding inter-confessional social relationships that demand further investigation.47 Was this practice widespread? And, if so, did it also create patron–client bonds between Mediterranean women of ordinary rank and Muslim dignitaries which might be negotiated to advantage when the need arose? On the other hand, the fact that the Maltese woman and her reproductive labor were subject to three layers of male custodial oversight – the mamluk, the British consul, and her husband – indicates that migration, and the securing of employment did not necessarily enhance female agency.

The service sector outside of the Tunisian court As scholarship on other Ottoman port-cities has demonstrated, the consulates represented microcosms of the wider Mediterranean world. The availability of labor in Mediterranean port-cities like Tunis was influenced by a number of factors, including legal changes regarding employment and worker mobility on the other side of the Sea. As Planel points out, the regulations of the Chambre de Commerce de Marseille were amended in 1835 so that French “artisans and servants were no longer subject to Chamber authorizations to leave and work abroad nor to the duty to deposit a caution [security deposit] prior to departure.” Nevertheless, employment in Tunisia, or elsewhere outside of France, was dependent upon “regional networks of patronage” that were still subject to legal limitations. For example, Barnabé Fouques (1781–1867), by profession a wool 223

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worker, was hired as a cook in 1829 for Mr Ventre, a resident merchant in Tunisia; however, Fouques’ passport for Tunis expressly stipulated that he return to France as soon as his employment ended.48 Despite these limitations, the expanding presence of middle-class Europeans in Tunisia created new labor demands beyond that normally supplied by kin as did the establishment of hotels and places of sociability, such as taverns or restaurants, which had not previously existed in large numbers in the capital. The consular missions directly employed members of local Tunisian society, Muslim and Jewish, as well as hiring retainers from among their fellow nationals or the heterogeneous community in the capital. We know from a 1826 document concerning the cost of reparations to the French funduq and the consular residence that “Moorish servants worked at the establishment” as well as Tunisian Janissaries who lodged there apparently in separate quarters.49 Janissaries in Tunisia differed from their counterparts in the Ottoman heartlands since they appeared to have served principally as guards, sentries, and escorts. In c.1856 the British consulate received an employment request from “Tayeb ben Mohamed El Medeni [sic], a native and resident of La Goulette, who seeks a position as an English janissary in the port.”50 In the countryside, Europeans employed Tunisians or North Africans as servants, guards, and shepherds. The English merchant, John Gibson, who resided in La Marsa in the early 1830s, owned oxen and horses which he had confided to the watchful care of bedouins from Tripolitania. As compensation for work, Gibson had paid the bedouins two years advance wages. Sometimes the needs of the Tunisian state for labor, particularly for military purposes, clashed with those of employers. In April 1834, Gibson’s bedouin guard was forcibly conscripted by the bey’s press gang; his coachman suffered a similar fate. It took the shaykh al-medina’s intervention to liberate the coachman, at least temporarily from state service. These incidents and others prompted resident Europeans to formally request that the bey issue teskeres [permits] exempting servants or employees from compulsory employment by the state.51 From the 1830s on, a veritable flood of cooks and servants brought from Europe appear on the passenger rolls of ships docking in port. That year the French consul engaged a French cook to assist his wife. A few years later, the servant of a Monsieur Falbe, carrying a Danish passport, and a Sardinian subject, the servant of a Monsieur D’Ambroise.52 In 1839 a cook brought in to work for the resident French family, the Monges, sailed from Marseille on the French brik L’Excellent, arriving in Tunis in five days. Three years later, a Sardinian ship transported in four days De Lagau’s cook, Alexis, as well as “a woman who is going to Mr Solal’s household.”53 But the current also went in the reverse direction as servants returned to Europe with the expiration of contracts or for other reasons. Some servants never made it back home, the case of the Maltese, Angelo Saliba, who died in Tunis in 1850 after a long period of employment at the British residence. Saliba had served the British consul general, Sir Edward Baynes, as his

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personal valet. The probate proceedings, completed in January, 1851, revealed that the Maltese steward possessed the following items: 436 piasters; one silver watch; one gold chain; a box of shirt studs; and other personal belongings. As a valet to a high-ranking European official, Saliba’s position in the hierarchy of service placed him near the top which is reflected in his possessions. However, Saliba left behind debts; he owed one hundred piasters to the Maltese Catholic priest, Father Stanilaus. A Tunisian woman named Mabruka also came forward during the probate inquiry to lay claims to his estate since she had lent him money which had not been reimbursed.54 Here we have suggestions that – in addition to serving masters for specified wages – servants also engaged in business deals or investments on the side. After mid-century, the number of hotel, cafes, restaurants, taverns, and inns in the capital city greatly expanded. These establishments, which tended to cater to Europeans, although of different social ranks, provided work for men and women, particularly widows, and functioned as mechanisms of social betterment for newcomers of ordinary means, many of whom first got their start in service of one kind or another.55 Joseph Tournier, who died in Tunis in 1870, took over the Hotel de France, first as manager, then as owner. Tournier presents just such a case of social mobility since he arrived in Tunis around 1844 as a “valet de chambre,” subsequently becoming an inn-keeper. The same held true for his common-law wife, Lazarine, who came to Tunisia in 1848 as a chambermaid. A European guest described their establishment in 1867 as a “Moorish house” on the edge of the madina that had been transformed into hotel, “one of the most comfortable in Tunis.”56 The hotel population reflected the increasing cosmopolitanism of Tunis after the mid-nineteenth century as travelers, investors, and the well-heeled from all over the Mediterranean arrived in greater numbers due to improved transportation. Needless to say, servants were suspected of, or accused of, stealing by their employers. Monsieur Guemos, a French subject residing near the stone quarries of Jabal Caroub, claimed that he had been the victim of a string of thefts and other violent acts. During the night of February 16, 1860, his home was broken into; the guilty party had entered through a window secured with a metal rod and stolen numerous possessions. Missing were a sack full of copper coins; hundreds of silver and gold piasters; towels, a silk cravat, a pair of grey pants, a kitchen knife, and ten pounds of mining powder. Guemos accused one of his Tunisian servants, Salah, in his employment for five months but whom he had fired – after paying Salah his wages – several days prior to the break-in.57 We opened the section on domestic service with the Neapolitan servants provoking a serious diplomatic imbroglio in 1833. Servants either Tunisian, North African, or imported from various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean world, gave rise to endless disputes involving not only the various nationalities residing in Tunis but also Tunisians. In 1868 the French consulate received a complaint from the Italian consulate regarding a French couple, the Messiers living in

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La Goulette, who refused to allow an unmarried Sicilian woman, Mlle. Passalaqua, to leave their service. Stated the French vice consul: I ordered Messier and his wife to give back the Sicilian woman, who is a domestic in their household, based upon the explicit demand of the Italian consulate. The Menier couple has refused to allow Mlle. Passalaqua to go to see her consular officer. Just as my janissary was leaving the Messier house, after Mr. Messier had refused to hand her over without an order to take her away, Mme. Messier boarded a coach with Mlle. Passalaqua and left for Tunis.58 In January, 1869 the affair of the Sicilian servant was still not resolved. Mlle Passalaqua’s relatives, who also apparently resided in the capital, demanded that her belongings returned as well as nine months of outstanding wages, calculated at fifteen copper piasters per month of service. The partial list of Mlle Passalaqua’s personal effects remaining in her previous employers’ possession is somewhat surprising: four camisoles and an equal number of pantalets; a cap known as “garibaldina” and a pair of gloves; two dresses; various clothing of wool, Indian cotton, and linen, and one dress of muslin; fives pairs of hosiery and so forth.59 One wonders if she filled a role other than servant since her personal belongings suggest a relatively middle-class status. That very same year witnessed another conflict over an Italian female servant’s wages which probably reflected the surge during this period of Italian immigration by women and men looking for work. What is interesting in this story is the layering of domestic service within the household of one of the most powerful of the Tunisian court notables, Mustafa Khaznadar. In this instance, the Italian consul general complained to the French consul in Tunis in May 1869, regarding an Italian woman, Anna Errera Vedova, who worked for a French national, Madame Meunier. The latter was employed in the Manuba palace of the Khaznadar as a “giardiniera” (gardener) and Meunier in turn had hired Anna as a servant but kept her in a “miserable state” by forcing her to work without pay; Madame, it was alleged, owed the abused Anna twenty piasters in back pay.60 English governesses appear to have been in demand among the European expatriate community in Tunis. Miss Peacopp, “an English woman living in Tunis,” was hired by a French national, Monsieur de Serre as a “tutress” for his daughter in 1869 but the child proved intractable since she “refused to learn anything but music,” at least according to the governess. The manner in which de Serre hired the unhappy Miss Peacopp and the nature of her work contract are significant. De Serre ran across the English governess while he was traveling through Italy and engaged her then as a governess for his recalcitrant child. Committed to writing, the agreement stipulated that Miss Peacopp would be reimbursed for the cost of her travel to Tunis from Italy and receive fifty francs per month – which her employer reneged upon, giving rise to long drawn out negotiations.61 In 1861 the summer residence of the British consul, Richard Wood, located in La Goulette, 226

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also boasted an English governess – and a piano – for Wood’s numerous offspring. As Wood’s wife, Christina, observed: “The servants are getting on all right, with slips and fights now and then. If you could get hold of Zahran and bring him along as cook it would be a good dodge and [good] thing. I believe Mohamed intends to leaving when his time is up. Don’t forget to bring me some of the painted handkerchiefs of the gaudiest colors” (as gifts for the servants).62 Finally, as ten of thousands of Mediterranean migrants poured into French Algeria after 1830, thousands of Algerian refugees flooded Tunisia. Most chose to relocate to the Tunis region where chances for employment appeared greater; a number were hired as servants either by Europeans or by Tunisians. Hassan ibn Ahmad al-Jaziri, 26 years old, arrived in Tunis sometime in 1874 to work for a Tunisian as a domestic. Described as “medium height, small moustache rather blond, squints slightly and speaks French,” Hassan did not prove the ideal servant since only twenty days after his arrival he was fired by his employer for reasons unknown. Out of work and apparently out of luck, one evening the hapless Hassan, “being drunk on wine, entered without permission a European house near the Bab al-Bahr in order to ask for work. His state of drunkenness . . . so scared the house’s inhabitants that they ran to the Zabtia [i.e. police] who arrested him and brought him to the civil prison in Driba where he remained nearly 31⁄2 months.” Questioned by the French consul about papers verifying his Algerian status, Hassan stated that “at the moment that he was arrested, he had his passport in his tarboush which was taken away from him by the agents of the police before he was imprisoned.”63 Hassan’s story is plausible since taverns dispensing wine had sprung up all over the madina by this period; and Europeans of all social ranks resided in the area of Bab al-Bahr. Once sprung from prison, Hassan disappears from the record, but we can speculate that he belonged to the mass of the “floating population” of the capital city, which grew rapidly as the century wore on.

Down and out in Tunis: charity, poverty, and plague Poverty among resident Europeans or Mediterranean folk in precolonial Tunisia has not yet been studied in depth, mainly because of the false notion that – as Europeans – they naturally occupied high places in the social hierarchy. However, misfortune was never too far away and often followed the illness or death of a productive family member. From the 1820s on, impoverished Maltese immigrants subsisted through petty street peddling, arousing the wrath of Tunisian and European shopkeepers with whom they competed for customers; some engaged in begging on city streets. Clearly Tunisian authorities were concerned about vagrants and the unemployed since in 1836 Mustafa Bey declared that “the laws of the kingdom demand that any [foreign] individual without means of subsistence are subject to expulsion from the country.”64 Moreover, until late in the century, Tunisia suffered recurrent epidemics which plunged surviving family members into extreme want, if kinship and other social welfare networks defaulted. The Fassy family represents one of the best documented cases of Europeans falling into misery. 227

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Dominique Fassy (1754–1818), a master sailmaker from Marseille, had been recruited from Tripoli to work in Tunisia in 1815 by the French vice-consul at the port who was also a relative.65 Employed by the bey in the naval yards, Dominique Fassy managed to eke out a living made increasingly precarious by his numerous offspring. Regarded with opprobrium by their European neighbors, the Fassys, with their six children, lived one step away from poverty and were often forced to borrow just to purchase food. “Mr. Fassy . . . does not have a cent to his name and owes money to everyone in La Goulette because of which the family is often tormented.”66 During Mahmud Bey’s reign (1814–1824), a terrible plague erupted in 1817 that persisted until 1820 and carried off a good proportion of Tunisia’s population. By November 1818 three members of the Fassy family – the father, mother, and one of the children – had succumbed to the disease, leaving five orphans ranging in age from 3 to 16 years and enormous debts.67 For the next months, they were kept alive through the charity of neighbors in the port, including several “Turks” who furnished basic provisions to the children. The French vice consul also periodically sent his servant with bread, meat, and oil but the plague had destroyed Tunisian agriculture so wheat was scarce. Moreover, finding a ship to take the orphans back to Marseille proved impossible at first because of the danger of plague as well as the orphans’ lack of resources. To make matters worse, some malevolent persons broke into their dwelling at the port and made off with all of their possessions. While the bey owed back wages to the deceased sailmaker, the presence of plague meant that connections between the port and the city of Tunis were interrupted, making it difficult to pursue the matter of the unpaid salary. In any case, the sum owed by the Tunisian state was less than the family’s cumulative obligations. Finally in April 1819, a Swedish vessel took the children to Marseille much to the relief of French consular and Tunisian officials, and the European community in general. They left behind a string of debts which took years to settle. One of the many significant dimensions of this case is that Tunisian Muslims (either designated as “Moors” or “Turks” in the sources) often provided assistance to the orphaned children in their capacity as neighbors in La Goulette. This suggests that religion or social background posed no obstacles to the kinds of charitable activities that might be forged out of residential or neighborhood associations and networks.68 What is also interesting is that, unlike so many other “down-and-out” tales without closure due to lack of sources, the story’s sequel is found on the other side of the Mediterranean in the archives of the Chambre de Commerce de Marseille. Application had been made from Tunis for the care of the Fassy orphans to the “Hôpital de la Charité and to the Société de Bienfaisance in Marseille. One of the younger girls was placed in a “école d’industrie” supervised by Catholic sisters; the two older girls were temporarily taken in by the Société until they could be placed as boarders with another Catholic order. But there is a final intriguing element to the Fassy affair which brings us back to the problem of labor, migration, and recruitment as well as the workings of networks and patronage spanning the Mediterranean. In June 1819 soon after the orphans had arrived 228

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in France, the nephew of their deceased father, Pierre Fassy, also a master sailmaker in Marseille, contacted the French consul in Tunis. What Pierre desired was to replace his deceased uncle in the service of the Tunisian state; he requested the consul’s intercession with the bey for employment.69 Thus, compassion, often combined with a desire to guarantee the collective honor of a particular national expatriate group, motivated the consuls to provide poor relief. Perhaps due to the burdens – a communal embarrassment – imposed by poverty-stricken families, like the Fassys, many of the consulates had ‘caisse de secours’ by the 1820s in case of dire need. For example, in 1825, the French consulate in Tunis had a fund of 2,000 francs “for any Europeans and for indigent French families.”70 Not surprisingly, widows often applied to the consulates and even to the beys for succor, although it should be noted that widows were viewed with particular suspicion by both European and Tunisian male authorities since they were “women without men,” yet, at the same time, often semi-independent. In 1830 Emanuelle Skiano, a Maltese widow, sought the assistance of the English consul some two years after her husband’s death which had left her alone with a child to support. While at first she had been able to find employment at the bey’s palace, probably as a servant, “her employer had no further occasion for her services, and [she] could not obtain other employ.” Skiano begged for financial assistance to pay for her passage back to Malta which was eventually arranged through the consul’s intervention.71 The recourse to Tunisian and consular poor relief was common before female Catholic missionaries settled in Tunis in the 1840s to organize social welfare activities and guarantee female morality among the subsistence migrants by keeping “Christian girls in the fear of God and working to rescue those who had given in to the attraction of vice.”72 Not infrequently, consuls and consulates had to repatriate individuals or rescue entire families in distress as they arrived in port or left Tunisia. In 1816 a “miserable” young man from Naples, “a shoe-maker without a dime,” who had come to Tunis in a fruitless search for family members, found himself stranded without funds to return home.73 In the 1830s, the Fiorintinis were supported by the French viceconsul, Gaspary, and another unfortunate family, the Romanis, resided with him as the mother and child had taken ill just as they were about to board ship. In 1847 Captain Bitirac, commander of a French vessel was paid fifty francs for the passage and sustenance “from Tunis to Marseille of the Widow Tarbourich and her three small children.”74 Finally, because Tunis was a busy Mediterranean port, ships of all nations put in there which meant that after accidents or intemperate weather crews might find themselves in distress. In 1828 the head of the French traders in Tunis contacted the Chambre de Commerce de Marseille regarding the plight of sailors: “it often happens that the sailors of a sunken ship, for lack of anywhere else to stay, if the only inn in the city is full, are forced to camp out in the courtyard of the consular building or in its upstairs galleries where they are exposed to the elements; often the sick are refused shelter at the inn or only admitted into the inn with great reluctance; the inn serves as a shelter for all the captains, sailors, and voyagers of all nations.”75 229

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Thus far we have seen how ties of one sort or another with the beys, their households, or the consulates might lead to job opportunities. However, a conflict from 1848 demonstrates how those without insufficient access to the right kinds of patronage might fall into poverty. Sometime before 1846, a French baker, Astoin, rented a part of a building on the edge of the madina. On the ground-level he baked and sold bread; upstairs he lodged with his large family. Being adjacent to the Sea Gate, the bakery attracted a huge clientele and his business flourished, for a while. But in October 1846, Ahmad Bey gave Astoin twenty-four hours to quit the locale, owned by the municipality, since the government desired to establish a guard post in the very spot where the bakery was situated. In his haste to quit the premises, Astoin left behind furnishings and equipment worth 125 piasters, a considerable sum. Burdened with dependent children, he next took refuge in a building occupied, but not owned, by Ghiggino, a Sardinian subject, who put at Astoin’s disposition, an oven, a store, and lodging for his family. Misfortune, generated by urban renewal projects, seemed to dog Astoin no matter where he set up shop. Soon after, the bey ordered the demolition of houses, shops, and a portion of the ramparts situated near the Bab al-Bahr, which also abutted onto Astoin’s new residence, since these were state properties. The demolitions not only lasted a year but also blocked his bakery and home from his customers so the hapless Astoin often ceased baking bread since he was unable to sell it.76 Worse still he and his family were forced to reside for an entire year next to the open city sewage drains in a partially demolished building. After even these unappealing lodgings were destroyed in the next phase of city modernization, Astoin found himself again in the streets with his family. Unlike the beys’ former cooks and chefs, who made good for themselves later on in the hotel business, Astoin could claim no direct ties to the palace, although French diplomats intervened on his behalf repeatedly. As importantly, property owning in this period was still prohibited for non-Tunisian subjects; his nomadic existence in the heart of densely populated Tunis, vainly attempting to “making a living” was largely the result of this fact. In the period prior to the granting of property rights to foreigners, service, particularly domestic service with the “right” patrons, integrated outsiders into the local economy and conferred status in the way that later property-holding “tied people to communities.”77 Deprived of both of these fundamental mechanisms for social positioning, people like Astoin, as other similar cases demonstrate, had difficulty “making it” in a preindustrial urban economy in the decades before colonialism.

Conclusions In considering work in a preindustrial, precolonial state, our methodology has been to unravel the skeins of interconnections from the inside out, in ever expanding circles, to ultimately consider the central Mediterranean corridor and the world beyond. Bourgeois newcomers with skills and knowledge to peddle 230

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to the Tunisian state could forge various kinds of relationships – patron–client, business partnerships, and so forth – not only with the resident consular clans and merchants but also with Tunisian notables and members of the beys’ huge courts. However, newly arrived immigrants of humble status most commonly worked as unskilled or semiskilled laborers in carpentry, carting, or masonry, in small familyoperated business, such as taverns or bakeries, or as servants. The poorest might street-peddle their humble wares, such as sweets, crudely manufactured in makeshift stoves in one of the city’s bachelor hostels, much to the neighbors’ dismay. People of ordinary means relied mainly on their own labor, their wits, on kin, if they had a kinship network, and on the benevolence of neighbors or strangers to survive. Maltese, Greeks, and Sicilians were employed as cooks, domestics, and valets – and even wet-nurses – by the Husaynid state as well as by elite Tunisian and resident European families. Domestic service in the households of either Tunisian notable families or resident European consuls and traders might implicate the “down-and-out” in favorable patron–client relations at times leading to upward social mobility. Household employment meant more than cleaning, cooking, or nursing children for middle-class Europeans or Tunisian notables since it serves, kinship groups and potentially the wider community in strands of exchange, obligation, patronage – and potentially any conflict. When social supports unraveled or community welfare mechanisms failed, impoverishment ensued with the result that unfortunate individuals or entire families were sometimes forcibly repatriated to country of origin. At the same time, poverty, combined with the need to salvage collective honor, motivated the consuls to provide poor relief. At the deepest level of analysis, this story is about the workings of a nineteenth-century Mediterranean port-city and how it progressively became enmeshed in ever wider circuits and circulations not only due to substantial in-migration but also due to the very process of searching for a daily living, of “making it” in Tunis.

Notes 1 Ahmad Ibn Abi al-Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-zaman bi-akhbar muluk tunis wa ‘ahd al-zaman, 8 vols (Tunis: al-dar al-tunisiyya lil-nashr, 1989), Vol. 3/4: 233–7; for the English consul’s version of the events, see Public Record Office, London, Foreign Office, Tunisia (hereafter PRO/FO] 77/24 Reade to London, February 3, 1833. 2 Prax, 1847, “ ‘Le commerce de Tunis avec l’intérieur de l’Afrique’, in Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer,” Aix-en-Provence, Algérie (hereafter CAOM), F80 1697. 3 PRO/FO 102/32, No. 7, Vice-consul Ferrier, “General Survey of Tunisia,” March 31, 1848. On the unreliability of Italian estimates, Romain H. Rainier, Les Italiens dans la Tunisie Contemporaine (Aix-en-Provence: Publisud, 2002), 23. The 1870 estimates come from a contemporary observer, G. B. Machiavella; cited in Dalenda Larguèche, Territoire sans frontières: La contrebande et ses réseaux dans la Régence de Tunis au XIXe siècle (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001), 134–5. On the numbers of French nationals (and for pre-colonial Tunisia in general), see Anne-Marie Planel’s invaluable study, “De la nation à la colonie: La communauté Française de Tunisie au XIXè siècle d’aprés les archives civiles et notariées du consulat générale de France à Tunis” (doctoral dissertation, 3 vols, Paris, EHESS, 2000) 1: 92–4.

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4 On gender and displacements, see Julia Clancy-Smith, “Women, Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre-Colonial Tunisia, c.1815–c.1870,” Gender and History, 17, 1(April 2005): 62–92. 5 Susan Cotts Watkins, “Social Networks and Social Science History,” Social Science History, 19, 3(Fall 1995): 295–311, emphasizes the importance of face-to-face or conversational networks as crucial to social patterning. 6 On poverty in indigenous pre-colonial Tunisian society, especially among Jewish and African minorities, Abdelhamid Larguèche, Les Ombres de la ville: Pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis (XVIIIè et XIXè siècles) (Tunis, Centre de Publication Universitaire, 1999); and Fanny Colonna (ed.), Etre Marginal au Maghreb (Tunis: Alif, 1993); see also Mine Ener, “Getting into the Shelter of Takiyat Tulun,” in Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 53–76; Michael E. Bonine (ed.), Population, Poverty, and Politics in Middle East Cities (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); and Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1–19, for definitions of poor and poverty. 7 Lucette Valensi, “Islam et capitalisme: production et commerce des chéchias en Tunisie et en France aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” in Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 16(1969): 376–400; Mohamed El Aziz Ben Achour, Catégories de la Société Tunisoise dans la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle (Tunis: Institut National d’Archéologie et d’Art, 1989), 374–8; Mustapha Kraïem, La Tunisie Précoloniale, 2 vols (Tunis: Société Tunisienne de Diffusion, 1973), 2: 37–40; and Julia Clancy-Smith, “A Woman Without Her Distaff: Gender, Work, and Handicraft Production in Colonial North Africa,” in A Social History of Women and the Family in the Middle East, ed. Margaret Meriwether and Judith Tucker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 25–62. 8 Dalenda Largueche (ed.), Histoire des femmes au Maghreb: Culture matérielle et vie quotidienne (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2000); Dalenda and Abdelhamid Largueche, Marginales en terre d’Islam (Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1992); Julia Clancy-Smith, “Envisioning Knowledge: Educating the Muslim Woman in Colonial North Africa, 1900–1918,” in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki Keddie, ed. Beth Baron and Rudi Matthee (Los Angeles, CA: Mazda Press, 2,000), 99–118; and Jamila al-‘Arabi, “rihlati ma’ al-fann darb min harir,” in Nisa’ wa dhakira, ed. Habib Kazdahgli (Tunis: Edition Média Com, 1993), 201–2. 9 The text of the 1863 convention is found in J. C. Hurewitz (ed.), The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd edn, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 1: 352–5. 10 Charles Monchicourt, “Les Italiens de Tunisie et l’Accord Laval-Mussolini de 1935,” in Bibliothèque des Questions Nord-Africaines, 2(1938): 3. 11 Marc Donato, L’Émigration des Maltais en Algérie au XIXème siècle (Montpellier: Collection Africa Nostra, 1985), 108; and Jean Ganiage, “Les Européens en Tunisie au milieu du XIXe siècle.” Cahiers de Tunisie, 3, 9(1955): 389–421, especially 405. 12 My approach to the question of work and migration has drawn upon the following works: Jacqueline Knorr and Barbara Meier (eds), Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Sarah Gualtieri, “Feminizing the Chain Migration Thesis: Woman and Syrian Transatlantic Migration, 1878–1924”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, 1(Spring 2004): 67–87, Donna R. Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Kathie Friedman-Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian

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Women in New York, 1870–1924 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996); and Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City: Regional migrations in France (Beverly Hill, CA: Sage Publications, 1983) and her Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, “So Close and Yet So Far: The Ambivalence of Dutch Colonial Rhetoric on Javanese Servants in Indonesia, 1900–1942,” in Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1998), 131–53. Homa Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 113–14. Leila Blili Temime, Histoire de Familles: Mariages, répudiations et vie quotidienne à Tunis, 1875–1930 (Tunis: Editions Script, 1999), 167–9; Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 112–13. In Samt al-Qusur (Les Silences du Palais, 1994), The Tunisian film-maker, Moufida Tlatli, explored the milieu of female servants, and the sexual favors expected of them, in the beys’ household during the late colonial period. Mohamed-Hédi Cherif, Pouvoir et société dans la Tunisie de H’usayn bin ‘Ali (1705–1740) 2 vols (Tunis: Publications de l’Université de Tunis, 1984) 1: 188–9. Charles Monchicourt, Documents historiques sur la Tunisie: Relations inédites de Nyssen, Filippi et Calligaris (1788, 1829, 1834) (Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritime et coloniales, 1929), 92–5. Lucette Valensi, “Esclaves chrétiens et esclaves noirs à Tunis au XVIII siècle,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 4(November–December, 1967): 1267–88; and Daniel Panzac, Les corsairs barbaresques: La fin d’une épopée, 1800–1820 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1999). Godfrey Feise, “Observations on the Regency of Tunis, 1812, 1813,” mss, No. 15.417 (The British Library, London [hereafter Feise, mss]), 92–4 and drawing No. 9 of lavishly dressed Christian slaves serving as domestics in elite households. CAOM, Aix, Algérie, F 80 1697, carton “Confins Algéro-Tunisiens,” anonymous mss, c.1835. Feise, mss, 6, 92–4. Of course, most of the slaves performed heavy manual labor under dreadful conditions, although those with skills might have a better lot in an otherwise bleak existence; Christian slaves as well as French nationals engaged in shipbuilding in Porto Farina until the rapid sanding up decreased demands for labor as shipyards and trade languished. Feise, mss, 5, 23, and 30–1. Panzac, Les corsaires barbaresques, 98–9; and Abdelhamid Larguèche, L’Abolition de l’Esclavage en Tunisie à travers les archives, 1841–1846 (Tunis: Alif, 1990), 18. Jean Ganiage, Les Origines du Protectorat Français en Tunisie (1861–1881) (Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Édition, 1968), 18. For example: PRO/ FO 77/22, Reade to London, September 17, 1831, reported that “an Austrian vessel arrived in this port on the 12th last [of September] from Constantinople, having on board a Turkish ‘chouse’ [vavuv in modern Turkish; roughly a military officer in the Ottoman army holding the rank of sergeant], charged to deliver to the Bey of Tunis the new military uniforms which the Sultan had directed should be worn in the future by the Bey and his Troops, and with which HH will be invested as soon as the Ship is admitted to pratique . . . I understand that this vessel has brought three Georgian women whom, it is suspected, are slaves, belonging to the suite of the Chouse, brought hither [to Tunis] for sale. Formerly great numbers of Georgian women were brought here. This however seldom happens now; but such as are sent are generally imported by Austrian vessels.”

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27 In 1880, the British Consul in Tunis brought a complaint to the Tunisian Prime Minister regarding “three black female slaves named respectively Anisa bint ‘Abdallah al-Barnawy, Fatima Barnawy and Aisha bint al-Barnawy who had escaped from their late master and at the instance of this agency and consulate general obtained letters of emancipation from the local authorities have since been restored to their former proprietors by Sidi Hamid Bin Ayyad, the Khalifa of the qaid of the negroes. Another black woman named Maimuna, it would appear, had shared the same fate and although the said Khalifa assured me some days ago that she had been married in accordance with her own wishes, and promised to produce her at this office in company with her husband, I have not either seen or heard of them since . . . I should demand that the above mentioned negresses be set at liberty forthwith, and that such an example by made of the offending Khalifa as shall deter others from interfering as he has done with the liberty of free subjects . . .” ANT, carton 228, dossier 414, Thomas Reade to Sidi Mustafa, the Tunisian Prime Minister, October 12, 1880. On race and racism in northern Africa, see Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 28 Al-Diyaf, Ithaf, Vol. 3/4: 202–3; the information on the slaves is found in the anonymous mss, CAOM-Aix F 80 1697, c.1835, which may have been composed by one of the court physicians at the Bardo. 29 Valensi, “Esclaves chrétiens,” 1279; al-Diyaf, Ithaf, Vol. 3/4: 286. 30 Temime, Histoire de familles, 167–9. 31 Ibid., 168–9; in aristocratic urban families, household service did not always mean dismal servitude. Frequently young girls taken in as domestics were raised along with the family’s children; their designation in Arabic rabiba or mrubbiyya (foster or step-daughter) signifies kin membership. 32 Abdelhamid Largueche, Abolition de l’esclavage en Tunisie à travers les archives, 1841–1846 (Tunis: Alif, 1990), 35; also Les Ombres de la ville. The most comprehensive study of slavery in Morocco is Mohammed Ennaji’s Soldats, domestiques et concubines: L’esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Tunis: Cérès Editions, 1994). 33 Al-Diyaf, Ithaf, Vol. 3/4: 233–7; quote 235. 34 CAOM, Aix, Algérie, F 80 1697, “Confins Algéro-Tunisiens,” 85. 35 Planel, “De la nation à la colonie, Vol. 1: 28; Ganiage, Les Origines du Protectorat Français en Tunisie, p. 597; Christian Windler, La Diplomatie comme expérience de l’autre: Consuls Français au maghreb (1700–1840) (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 425–6; and André Raymond, introduction and translation, 2 vols, Commentaire historique of Ibn Abi l-Diyaf. Present aux hommes de notre temps. Chronique des rois de Tunis et du pacte fondamental. Chapitres IV et V (Tunis: Alif, 1994), chapter 2, 160. 36 Archives Nationales de Tunisie (hereafter ANT), série historique (hereafter H) carton 227, dossier 411, Wood to Count Raffo, October 17, 1856. 37 PRO/FO 77/30, Reade to London, April 18, 1837. 38 ANT, H carton 226, dossier 409, Ancram to Bey, January 3, 1838. 39 Ganiage, Les Origines du Protectorat Français en Tunisie, 11; Ahmad By’s newly constructed, lavish residence at Muhammadiya, inspired by Versailles, required a large pool of skilled labor for building, some of it unavailable in Tunisia at the time, as well as servants to staff it. 40 Planel, “De la nation à la colonie,” Vol. 3: 734. 41 ANT, H carton 207, dossier 96, Roches to Bey, January 10, 1860. 42 PRO/FO 102/29, 1845, “An Account of the Present State of Tunis,” by James Richardson, Public Record Office, Kew, 1845, which contains an insertion entitled “Addendum on the Tunisian Harem.” Madame Berner’s account has only survived, as far as we know, in an abbreviated verbatim form inserted into Richardson’s Addendum.

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43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Richardson states that he is including the material on the harem for the following reason: “I shall now copy a few passages from two other visits to the ladies of the royal family of Tunis, in order to present a proper idea of Tunisian female aristocracy to the reader.” Ibid., account of Mme. Berner. Ibid., Lady Temple’s account, also inserted into Richardson’s Addendum, is apparently verbatim. Ibid., account of Miss Smith. PRO/ FO 77/20, April 3, 1829. The most work on wet-nursing in Muslim societies during the medieval periods has been done by Avner Giladi, Breast-feeding in medieval Islamic Thought: A Preliminary Study of Legal and Medical Writings (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999) but we can not assume that this applies to nineteenth-century Tunisia. Dino Cinel, “The seasonal emigrations of Italians in the nineteenth century: From internal to international destinations,” in Journal of Ethnic Studies, X, 1(Spring, 1982): 43–68, reports that Italian women from Lucca engaged in seasonal migrations to Marseilles to work as wet-nurses in the 1850s. See also Dalenda Larguèche, “Les femmes, le savoir-faire médical et la maîtrise du corps dans la Tunisie traditionnelle,” in Histoire des femmes au Maghreb: Culture matérielle et vie quotidienne, ed. Dalenda Larguèche (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2000), 209–35. Planel, “De la nation à la colonie,” Vol. 1: 81–3. Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille (hereafter CCM]: série MQ 52, carton 78, August 21, 1826. ANT, H carton 224, dossier 403, 1856. PRO/FO 77/25, Gibson to Reade, April 1834. Archives Diplomatiques-Nantes (hereafter AD-N], Tunisie, premier versement, carton 406b, Gaspary to the consul general, October 24, 1820 and May 25, 1822. AD-N, carton 409b, Gaspary, June 30, 1839; and carton 410b, Gaspary to de Lagau, December 21, 1842. PRO/FO 335/99/8, probate proceedings for Angelo Saliba, died Tunis July 5, 1850; probate settled January 16, 1851. The issue of widowhood among the expatriate Mediterranean population in North Africa deserves further study; Muslim and Jewish societies strongly encouraged remarriage as soon as possible. Important theoretical work on widows and widowhood has been done by Kenda Mutongi, “ ‘Worries of the heart’: Widowed mothers, daughters and masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940–60,” Journal of African History, 40(1999): 67–86. Planel, “De la nation à la colonie,” Vol. 3: 585–6; 733–4; and AD-N, carton 413, Cubisol to Botmiliau, August 25, 1872. ANT, H carton 207, dossier 96, February 18, 1860. AD-N, carton 413, Cubisol to Botmiliau, December 29, 1868. AD-N, carton 413, “Notes des effets Réclamés,” Goletta, December 28, 1868. AD-N, Carton 381, correspondence between the French consulate in Tunisia and the Italian consulate, letter in Italian from the Italian consul-general to Botmiliau, May 14, 1869. AD-N, carton 382, correspondence between the French and British consulates in Tunisia, July 14, 1869–November 2, 1869. St Antony’s College, Oxford University, Richard Wood, Personal Papers, Box 1, “Personal Correspondence, 1855–1898,” Letter WD269-271, written by Christina Wood to her husband. AD-N, carton 413, Cubisol to De Billing, September 24, 1874. Al-Diyaf, Ithaf, Vol. 3/4: 267.

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65 Planel, “De la nation,” 1: 49 and Vol. 3: 751. 66 AD-Nantes, carton 406b, Gaspary, La Goulette, November 9, 1818. 67 On the plague, see al-Diyaf, Ithaf, Vol. 3/4: 3: 165, reign of Mahmud Bey [1814–1824]; and Nancy Gallagher, Medicine and Power in Tunisia, 1780–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 33–9. 68 CCM, MQ 52, carton 77, Fassy file, 1815–1827. 69 CCM, MQ 52, carton 77, letter from French consul, Tunis, to CCM, June 6, 1819. 70 CCM, MQ 52, carton 78, letter of April 13, 1828 from the head (deputé) of the French trading community in Tunis to the Chambre de Commerce, Marseilles. 71 PRO/FO 77/21, 1830. 72 Quote from ANT, H carton 64, dossier 755, letter from French consul, Béclard, to the Ahmad Bey, October 19, 1854, referring to the work of the Sisters of St Joseph, a French Catholic missionary Order. On the Order in Tunisia, see Julia Clancy-Smith, “Migrations, legal pluralism, and identities: Algerian ‘expatriates’ in pre-colonial Tunisia,” in Identity, Memory and Nostalgia: France and Algeria, 1800–2000, ed. Patricia Lorcin (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 3–17 and Pierre Soumille, “Les Activités et les oeuvres des congrégations religieuses catholiques en Tunisie à l’Époque du protectorat français,” in La Tunisie mosaïque ed. Jacques Alexandropoulos and Patrick Cabanel (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2000), 319–24. 73 AD-N, vice-consulate, La Goulette, carton 406b, 1815. 74 AD-N, vice-consulate, La Goulette, cartons 409b, 410a, 411a, which cover the period 1839–48. 75 CCM, MQ 52, carton 78: April 13, 1828. 76 ANT H, carton 206, dossier 88, French consul, Rousseau, to Ahmad Bey, September 1848. 77 Rachel Sturman, “Property and attachments: Defining autonomy and the claims of family in nineteenth-century western India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47, 3(July 2005): 611–37.

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10 FOREIGN WORKERS IN EGYPT 1882–1914 Subaltern or labour elite? Anthony Gorman

In the hegemonic discourse of modern Egyptian historiography that rests on the dichotomy of the Egyptian and the foreign, the worker has not been exempt. Foreign workers have regularly been portrayed as separate from the Egyptian worker on the basis of their legal, economic and political status and cast as a labour elite whose presence was testimony to the penetration of international capitalism and whose greater prosperity was due to the benefits of colonialism. This picture needs substantial revision. Foreign workers in Egypt, however defined, were not a homogeneous group in economic status, social class or political attitudes. While they may have enjoyed a relatively privileged position according to various ‘objective’ criteria, the historical record indicates an internationalist trend among workers that grew out of locally based anarchist elements and practical shop floor politics that sought to defend the rights of both foreign and Egyptian workers against the predations of capital and oppressive state authority. Through organization, industrial militancy and propagation of ideas, this voice of resistance constructed a multiethnic, class self-identity that opposed affiliations based on nationality and religion and emphasized an independent voice in dealing with contemporary economic and social issues that presents an important case of subaltern agency that counters the prevailing national–imperial polarity. From the 1980s an increasing body of Western scholarship has been dedicated to an analysis of the historical development of the working class in the Middle East.1 Often building on earlier local studies,2 this literature has generally focused on the economic and political aspects of the phenomenon. The emergence of a local industrial proletariat was viewed as part of the process fostered by colonialism of the economic incorporation of the region into the international capitalist system or, alternatively, the role of the native workers and working class and its contribution to the nationalist movement was emphasized.3 In this latter context, the foreign worker, framed by the Manichean struggle between imperialism and nationalism has at best occupied an ambiguous position in studies on the 237

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Egyptian labour movement. Although given some recognition for introducing new models of labour organization and militant industrial tactics adopted by their Egyptian counterparts, foreign workers have been regarded as beneficiaries of the colonial order and subsequently casualties of its dismantlement. Any basis for solidarity between foreign and Egyptian workers has been seen as undercut by the different conditions under which the two groups worked, particularly differential wage rates, the ethnic character of certain trades, distinct social standing and the legal advantages available to those of foreign nationality. Thus, while recognizing their common status as workers Goldberg went to some pains to distinguish between these two working classes, characterizing foreign workers as some sort of labour elite,4 a distinction suggestive of the concept of a labour aristocracy.5 Beinin and Lockman’s study which is principally concerned with the relationship of organized Egyptian labour with the Egyptian national movement, took a more ambivalent view towards foreign labour. While noting cases of cooperation between foreign and Egyptian workers they regularly qualified these by reference to differences that served as the basis of conflict between the two groups.6 Finally, in analysing the foreign presence in Egypt, a large number of studies – not only those on the labour movement – have suffered from a tendency to reduce all of its manifestations to the economic and political project of colonialism. In this equation foreign workers are linked economically with comprador and international capitalism and politically with imperialism. Foreign workers themselves are not given a voice. A more accurate understanding of the position of foreign workers in Egypt requires consideration of the full range of the political, economic and social circumstances and the reconstruction of their subjective reality and discursive practice. Material for such a study is not lacking. In the period before 1914 individual workers and organizations in Egypt were responsible for a rich periodical and pamphlet literature. The first avowed workers newspaper was the short-lived il Lavoratore published by Italian internationalists in Alexandria in February 1877. Four years later the Greek Labour Society in Alexandria began issuing a monthly bulletin and an Italian language daily L’Operaio (‘The Worker’) appeared in the same city in early 1889. With the new century a whole series of labour and mainstream newspapers that expressed themselves sympathetic to the interest of workers testified to the new importance of the working class. These publications were not all of a kind. They ranged from the organs of workers’ organizations of a strong ethnic character with aims confined to the needs of the membership to radical publications championing a fervent international anarchosyndicalism. Pamphlets written by labour activists discussed ideas and issues as they affected the life of the working man. Despite this richness, there has been an almost total neglect of these sources with most scholarship relying on official sources (both Egyptian and foreign) and selective use of the Arabic language press. The result has been considerable distortion of a complex issue. This article will first problematize the basis of the distinction made between the foreign and indigenous worker and then focus on the ideological aspects and 238

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practical manifestations of the broad internationalist–anarchist trend amidst the competing ideological and social streams of thought within and outside the emerging labour movement. It will examine the rise of new militant labour organizations, the development of industrial tactics and the articulation of strategies of resistance based on cooperation and collaboration between foreign and Egyptian workers. Drawing on a range of neglected sources and a rereading of other materials ‘against the grain’ it will seek to reconstruct the voice of a group that was subaltern in relation to both foreign residents and the Egyptian elites. Not always ideologically coherent but often effective in practice, the internationalist current sought to articulate an idiom of solidarity between all workers that placed it in conflict politically with nationalist and colonial elites and economically with the emerging capitalist system.

Definitional difficulties Before discussing their position in Egypt it is first necessary to define the term ‘foreign workers’. It has been standard practice in the literature to assume if not openly assert that the foreign working class by definition held foreign, usually European, nationality and that they were thus protected under the Capitulations and not subject to Egyptian law. It is certainly true that some foreigners, among them Italians, Russians, Montenegrins, Serbians, Maltese and Cypriots (the last not formally until 1914) enjoyed this status. Further, as the territory of the new Greek state expanded during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing numbers of Greeks, probably the largest group in the foreign working class, benefited from the same protection. However, this was not true of all Greeks. In the 1917 census, slightly more than a quarter of those listed as of ‘Greek race’ were local subjects or held Ottoman nationality and therefore not protected under the Capitulations (the percentage is likely to be even higher in the 1907 census). In addition, Armenians and Syrians, also Ottoman or Egyptian subjects, had no privileged legal status. Moreover, while foreign nationality afforded the holder certain privileges these were dependent on the willingness of the relevant consulate to provide them. In the context of labour struggles and radical political activities the evidence suggests that the legal rights of foreign nationals were at times ignored by the authorities when it stood in the way of other political priorities. A less legalistic definition of the foreign worker that uses ethnicity, or ‘race’ (to use the official term from the Egyptian census), namely those that were not ‘ethnically Egyptian’, also presents difficulties. Egypt was historically an ethnically pluralist society and the concept of Egyptian ethnicity belies the diversity within its population, not just the presence of Muslims, Copts and Jews (since these religious affiliations had ethnic undertones) but also Bedouin, Nubian and Sudanese. Beyond Egypt, Greeks, Armenians and Syrians were long established peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Ethnicity was an important part of social identity but, however constructed, it did not equate to foreignness or nationality. Of those listed as holding Italian nationality in the 1917 census just under 20 per cent were 239

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not ethnically Italian and over 6 per cent were Egyptian. Finally, in discussing foreign workers in Egypt, some have drawn attention to the temporary nature of their employment with the implication that foreign workers were little concerned with matters beyond short-term economic gain.7 In the context of the labour movement this seems misplaced since many foreign workers played a strong and determined part in labour struggles. Moreover, the case of the itinerant foreign worker, a genuine phenomenon, should be tempered with the many examples of foreign families that were born and resident in Egypt sometimes for generations. In addition to these ‘objective’ markers, the employment culture and the structure of the labour force have been invoked as the basis for differences between the foreign and Egyptian worker. Thus it is argued that there was a marked tendency to ethnic divisions amongst workers across a whole range of trades.8 Thus Lord Cromer’s 1905 Report on Egypt notes, ‘Boot-mending, as well as boot-making, is almost entirely in the hands of Greeks and Armenians. The drapery trade is controlled by Jews, Syrians and Europeans, the tailoring trade by Jews.’9 There may be some force to these generalizations but the ethnic character of various trades depended on a range of matters and we should not accept them uncritically. Even in traditional occupations the record is not at all unequivocal. Cromer notwithstanding, the shoemakers at the beginning of the twentieth century seem to be ethnically a very mixed group. In dealing with the occupations of the new industrial class, such as cigarette makers, we should be even more circumspect. Further, the well-attested phenomenon of a wage differential between European and foreign workers, also claimed to be a serious point of differentiation between the two groups, clearly did not per se exclude collaboration. Indeed, the phenomenon of the international unions suggests we need to examine more closely the record of the interethnic relations within the working class rather than rely on generalized statements. The fuzziness of the definition of foreign worker is not to deny that there were differences between foreign and Egyptian workers. Accordingly, I will employ the term ‘foreign worker’ in a pragmatic way to refer to the diverse mix of Armenians, Greeks, Levantines, Italians, Maltese and various other European workers as opposed to the Arabophone Egyptian workers. However, we should be careful in ascribing characteristics and drawing conclusions about these two groups in a general way. There were ethnic Greeks who held Egyptian nationality; ethnic Egyptians who held Italian citizenship and Egyptian subjects that were Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Indeed, the heterogeneous nature of the working class in Egypt suggests that one would expect a vigorous debate regarding the social, cultural and political identity of foreign workers that revolved around issues of nationality, ethnicity, religion and class.

Historical background With the coming to power of Muhammad ‘Ali at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury Egypt began a process of significant economic, technological and social 240

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transformation. An extensive program of reform of military organization, education, industry and the system of land tenure maintained under his successors sought to consolidate the institutions and economic stability of an emerging modern Egyptian state. During the reign of Isma‘il, this ambitious program of modernization resulted in mounting indebtedness which facilitated increasing economic control of the country by a diverse array of French, Belgian, British and other commercial interests. In 1882 this encroachment culminated in the occupation of the country by the British who consolidated their control of Egypt while its inexorable incorporation into the international economy continued. However, the foreign presence in Egypt was not confined to the colonial administration and the activities of the haute bourgeoisie but included increasing numbers of workers coming to the country, among them the Italian, Greek and Dalmatian workers that had arrived to assist Egyptian and Syrian labourers in the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s.10 After 1882 these foreign workers would come to play a key role in the development of working-class organizations, political radicalism and a militant labour movement. The growing numbers and sophistication of the foreign working class during the second half of the nineteenth century was evident in the formation of the first modern workers’ associations. As early as 1862 a group of Italian workers had set up the Italian Workers Society (Società Operaia Italiana). Other organizations followed: the Brotherhood of Workers (I Adelphotis ton Ergaton) formed by Greek workers from Corfu in 1872, the Greek Labour Society (I Elliniki Ergatiki Etairia) established in 1881 and Italian craftsmen who set up the Italian Artisans Brotherhood (Fratellanza Artigiana Italiana) in 1883, all of them in Alexandria. The aims of these bodies were initially quite limited, being primarily dedicated to the welfare of their members and providing of a forum for social activities. In this way they shared some functions with the guilds, the craft associations that were part of the traditional Ottoman order. However, their establishment testifies to a growing awareness of the changing conditions under which workers operated and the need for more activist organizations.11

The anarchist movement The main ideological force behind the new labour militancy that would emerge in Egypt by the end of the nineteenth century was an internationalist anarchist current.12 Anarchism, internationalism or anti-authoritarian socialism,13 had first developed in Egypt among radical circles of the local Italian community early in the second half of the nineteenth century. Two visits by Amilcare Cipriani to Alexandria during the 1860s testify to an already nascent internationalist group.14 In 1871 the Paris Commune uprising energized radical politics in Europe and beyond. In Egypt these revolutionary currents began to find fertile ground amongst some Italian workers of the Italian Workers Society. In the 1870s this offshoot evolved into a more radical political organization, Pensiero ed Azione (‘Thought and Action’), a republican group with a Mazzinian charter that attracted 241

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veterans from the campaigns of Garibaldi and other elements.15 In April 1876 radical dissidents from Pensiero ed Azione were joined by Italian refugees fleeing political repression to form an official section of the International in Alexandria.16 By early the following year, additional sections (including a separate women’s section) were established in Cairo, Port Said, with a smaller cell operating in Ismailia.17 Strongly influenced by Bakunin’s thought, anarchists in Egypt opposed institutional hierarchies as being inherently authoritarian and regarded the state, capitalism, religion and private property as instruments of repression and the root of exploitation. Accordingly they sought their abolition and the emancipation of the individual, and particularly of working men and women, through education. Within the anarchist movement, there were differing views on the role of labour organizations. Anarcho-individualists or libertarians saw even these as hierarchical structures and favoured spontaneous, collective action. Anarcho-syndicalists, on the other hand, believed that organized labour was a necessary instrument for the liberation of the working class. The tension and often struggle between these two wings of anarchism would hamper the effectiveness of the movement. In Egypt the individualists were the dominant current until the end of the nineteenth century when anarcho-syndicalism became increasingly influential, in part because of the changing nature of the working class. In its earliest phase the majority of anarchists were skilled artisans, though some were professional people or owned small, commercial businesses. By the beginning of the twentieth century the increasing numbers of the new industrial proletariat of skilled factory workers and those employed in large utilities meant there was a greater importance given to maximizing the influence of large workforces.

International unions The international or mixed union (Arabic niqaba mukhtalifa; Greek diethnis enosis) was the natural vehicle for anarcho-syndicalists and the clearest and most concrete expression of common organization between foreign and Egyptian workers. Made up of members regardless of nationality, these unions became prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century when they were formed by cigarette workers, tobacco workers, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, shop workers and printers. Some of these unions adopted evocative names that reflected their progressive character and quasi-spiritual aspirations such as Concord (tailors), Progress (tobacco workers) and Reform (shoemakers).18 While usually made up of a single trade or occupation, international unions could bring together workers on a broader basis. The International Union of Workers and Employees was formed in Cairo in 1909 with the aim of championing the interests of workers against exploitation by capital. At a meeting attended by more than 2,000 people at which its constitution was approved, speakers addressed the audience in Arabic, French, Greek, Italian and German on the advantages of common action of workers and international solidarity.19 Among proposals accepted was the 242

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establishment of a mutual aid treasury, the foundation of clubs and commercial establishments for common use and the acceptance of the bosses as members of the association. International unions, like earlier labour organizations, were able to provide assistance for members, including medical treatment, provision of medicines and financial support with funeral expenses. In addition, they were a vehicle for articulating the demands and maximizing the influence of workers in negotiating their conditions of work. Their principal and most potent weapon was the strike but workers might also employ other tactics during an industrial dispute, such as sabotage as occurred during the tram strike of 1908 and boycotting. The campaign conducted by the cigarette union to insist on the accurate labelling of machine-made cigarettes signified an awareness of the discretionary power of the consumer.20 In industrial disputes, the special nature of the Egyptian situation meant that workers were able to appeal to a number of authorities, not only the Egyptian government and the British representative (Lord Cromer for much of this period), but also the governments of Greece and Italy, whose nationals were prominent in the workforce. This strategy need not be regarded as simply an expression of national allegiance but part of the practical pursuit of advantage. The deportation of ringleaders, such as occurred with cigarette workers in January 1902, and the use of divisive tactics by consuls can have put workers under few illusions about the political priorities of their national representatives. These international unions should be seen as spheres of anarchist influence rather than their creatures. More dedicated anarchist elements within some of these international unions set up resistance leagues (leghe di resistenza) that then joined to form a broader federation of similar bodies. In Alexandria individual resistance leagues were organized in 1902 among the printers, tailors and cigarette rollers who shared a common seat.21 In Cairo an International Resistance Federation was established in 1909 by a number of organizations – the Printers Union, the Workers and Employees Association, the Atheists’ Circle, the Circle of Free Thinkers and the Association of Cigarette Makers.22 This provided a centre for meetings, a forum for the discussion of anarcho-syndicalist ideas and the planning of industrial strategy.

Union leadership The president or spokesman of many of these international unions was often a Greek doctor, presumably chosen as an educated and respectable figure who could articulate the demands of the workers and negotiate for them with employers during disputes.23 Some of these men, however, were of genuinely progressive, if not radical, views who could take an enthusiastic and proactive role during strike action. In Alexandria, Dr Polis Modinos, for example, was accused of displaying ‘an intensity or ardour in his excessive advocacy of a strike’.24 However, it is the leadership on the factory floor that provides a more interesting insight into the character of the international unions. Workers themselves, these leaders were 243

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drawn from Jewish and Greek anarchist elements involved not only in labour activism but also in other radical forms of association.25 Perhaps one of the bestknown militants in Cairo was Solomon Goldenburg (sometimes Goldemburg).26 A cigarette worker, Goldenburg first appears in the historical record during the cigarette workers’ strike in Cairo in December 1899. From then until the First World War he was a prominent labour activist playing a particularly important role in the revitalization of the cigarette workers union in 1908. Goldenburg was also a central figure within anarchist circles. In 1901 he served on the provisional committee of the Free Popular University in Cairo and played a prominent part at meetings of the International Federation of Resistance and the International Association of Cooperation for the Improvement of the Working Classes (l’Association internationale de coopération pour l’amélioration des classes ouvrières) (henceforth IAC) in 1909. Another prominent Jewish labour leader and cigarette worker was Samuele Freundlich. One of the ringleaders of the December 1903 strike, Freundlich was blackballed by the main cigarette manufacturers following their victory in the dispute and had great difficulty in finding work afterwards. Like Goldenburg he was a committed anarchist, taking part in the attempt to set up the Free Popular University in Cairo and continuing to be active in anarchist circles until 1914. It is unknown whether Goldenberg and Freundlich were born in Egypt or had migrated there but they were both Egyptian subjects which suggests, given the German origin of their family names, a conscious identification with their country of residence. The considerable Greek presence in the labour movement was also well represented in the ranks of union leadership. One notable figure was a woodturner, Panos Macheras (or Yiannopoulos), who had been involved in anarcho-syndicalist activities on Pyrgos during the 1890s where he had been associated with an anarchist paper. Following government repression Macheras fled to Egypt where he arrived in April 1901 and quickly joined a small group of Greek anarchists in Cairo. A member of the provisional committee of the Free Popular University in 1901, Macheras remained active in anarchist and labour circles until his departure for America in April 1903. Another Greek, Nicolas Doumas, played a more lasting role on the labour scene.27 A shoemaker by trade, Doumas first appeared in Egypt during the cigarette workers’ strike of December 1903 when he addressed a meeting held in solidarity with the striking workers. Over the next decade he was a prominent participant in labour and anarchist circles in Cairo speaking at many meetings including those called to set up an International Reading Room (1907), the International Federation of Resistance, the IAC and the Atheists’ Club. In 1908 he managed the anarchist newspaper, O Ergatis (‘The Worker’), which described itself as an organ for the ‘emancipation of women and the worker’, and also wrote pamphlets on workers and capitalism. Under pressure from authorities he was forced to leave Egypt for Greece in November 1912 where in the following year he founded the Shoemakers’ Union in Athens and later became a member of the central committee of the Greek Socialist Party.

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The prominence of Jews, Greeks and, to a lesser extent, Italians in the leadership of international unions probably reflects the greater industrial experience and level of education of these workers. Nevertheless, some Egyptians were also involved, such as Muhammad Sidqi, a leader in the cigarette strike of 1899, though generally native names are difficult to come by in the record. In part, the nature of the sources may explain this absence. Egyptian workers were clearly an important element in the formation of international unions. In 1901 the inaugural meeting of the International Mutual Aid Association of Shoemakers elected a committee of fourteen councillors made up of five Greeks, five Egyptians, two Syrians, one Italian and one Armenian, ratios that presumably reflected the composition of the union.28 Ministry of Interior documents of this time also mention the attendance of Egyptian workers at anarcho-syndicalist meetings on a number of occasions without identifying them.29 Nevertheless, it seems likely that foreign workers were represented in greater proportion to their numbers than Egyptian workers amongst the ranks of the leadership of these associations.30

Cigarette workers and the international union The cigarette rollers, it has often been noted, were one of the most significant groups of the new industrial working class and key players in the development of the labour movement in Egypt. Cigarettes had been a growing industry during the second half of the nineteenth century and had begun to expand particularly after 1882 with correspondingly increased employment opportunities. The first cigarette workers’ association appears to have been formed by exclusively Greek cigarette rollers in Cairo in 1894 in the course of an early strike. A similar organization, the Greek Association of Cigarette Makers (Ellinikos Sindesmos ton Sigaropion) was established in Alexandria two years later.31 The dispute of 1894 which had resulted in an agreement between the cigarette makers and employers was the prelude to the larger, more significant strike of 1899 regarded by many scholars as the beginning of the modern labour movement in Egypt.32 Prior to the calling of the strike the cigarette makers’ association, now calling itself I Enosis (The Union), had begun accepting as members all cigarette rollers, irrespective of nationality. In practical terms the membership may have remained predominantly Greek but its expansion showed that Greek workers recognized their common interest with other workers and that a more inclusive union would be a more effective force in bargaining with the employers. The change was also reflected in the leadership. While the president of the Union, Dr Elias Apostolou Kyriazis, and much of the leadership was Greek, there were also Jewish and Egyptian elements involved in organising the strike action.33 The 1899 strike, which began in December and involved some 1,600 workers, had its origin in concrete grievances. Workers complained that the agreement of 1894 regarding the classification and pay rates of rollers had not been honoured by the manufacturers, that arrangements regarding the assessment of rolling

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were unsatisfactory, and that the company was making excessive profits from sales of coffee, cognac and mastic in the company buffet.34 However, the dispute revolved as much around the character of the new union. The workers argued that it was a benevolent society and demanded the right of collective bargaining and action. The manufacturers held the Union to be of ‘a revolutionary nature’ and its delegates to be a kind of ‘comité de surveillance’, a view which given the anarchist elements in the workers’ leadership had some foundation. Further, they insisted that any complaints from workmen should be forwarded individually to the Manufacturers Federation, the group of employers that had been established in 1894.35 In the ensuing weeks, both parties manoeuvred and developed tactics that would become stock in trade over the following decade. Led by Nestor Gianaclis, the manufacturers sought to exploit divisions amongst the workers by offering to take back workers who agreed not to smoke in the workroom. A number who accepted this offer reported for work though most were persuaded by picketers to withdraw. In January employers instituted a lockout then sought to break the strikers by importing labour. A report that twenty Egyptian workers were hidden at the Vafiadis factory provoked a picket there while workers brought in from Port Said by Kyriazi Brothers were unable to cross the picket lines. Rumours circulated that a 1,000 German women were being imported to replace those on strike.36 Meanwhile, the union was seeking to shore up the strike financially by arranging for a loan of 600 pounds to serve as the basis for a support fund to assist less well-off workers, setting up a lottery and planning a public meeting to solicit additional support. The industrial action dragged into February until, after one draft agreement was repudiated by the workers, an understanding granting wage increases and recognizing the standing of the new association was reached and signed on 22 February with copies forwarded to the Egyptian, Italian and Greek governments.37 The cigarette workers’ strike of 1899–1900 was seen as a great victory for collective action and proof of the advantages of a workers’ organization in their struggle against predatory factory owners. The Union was now set up on a sound financial basis bringing in a monthly income of almost LE10 which allowed the maintenance of an office, the provision of medical expenses and other forms of assistance for members in addition to a healthy surplus.38 Along with the tailors’ union, which had also conducted a successful strike at the same time, the cigarette workers union became an inspiration and model for other international workers’ associations. Vasilios Kalliarekos extolled them at a shoemakers’ meeting: The cigarette makers are the first in Egypt to have shaken off the yoke of slavery and having achieved freedom are happy already in the organization; we should consider ourselves fortunate because in our time they found the love of one other as a basis for the happiness of the members of each profession.39 246

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The 1899 strike had been settled relatively peacefully with little need for interference from the police. Events in Cairo at the end of 1901 took on a different character and witnessed perhaps the first sustained violent clashes between striking workmen and authorities that set a pattern of confrontation over the succeeding years. The dispute began when about 150 workers at Soussa, a new factory and unregistered with the union, went on strike. The action spread to other factories and the Union was soon drawn in. Over the next month street battles raged between strikers, characterized by the authorities as ‘aggressors attacking the liberty of work of their comrades and the security of commerce’, and the police armed with canes and fire hoses for control of the streets.40 K. Asterides, editor of Ergasia and labour correspondent for the Greek language Tilegraphos in Alexandria, wrote vivid reports of the clashes, at one point receiving an eye injury from a police cane for his trouble. The general consul of Norway and Sweden was also injured in a fracas. Cafés were raided. Reports circulated that the strike was spreading to Alexandria. Certainly the confrontations made clear the need for organization amongst other workers. On 15 December, a meeting was called at the Café Shisha attended by about 500 workers with the aim of establishing an International Union of Tobacco Workers, that is, the less-skilled cigarette workers.41 The strike continued into the new year when Gryparis, the Greek diplomatic agent, stepped in and authorized the deportation of four Greek workers. The action raised widespread protest in the Greek community not only because of the dangerous precedent it set for dealing with labour disputes but because, since at least one of the deportees held Ottoman nationality, the action was strictly illegal. A protest meeting was organized by anarchists in Cairo at which Greeks, Italians, a French journalist and an Ottoman Jew spoke on the workers’ right to strike.42 The deportees were subsequently allowed back into Egypt after having signed an undertaking that they would give the authorities no further cause for complaint but the strike had been broken. The defeat seems to have precipitated something of a crisis within the union with the press reporting considerable internal turmoil amongst members in the summer of 1902.43 If the strike of 1899 had been a victory for the workers and that of 1901 had seen the employers successfully fight back with the backing of the police, the strike in Cairo at the end of 1903 was a more cataclysmic struggle. Again the dispute began in December when cigarette workers called a strike in response to a lowering of rates by a number of the leading manufacturers. Initially opposing the action declaring it had no funds to support the workers, the union pledged its support when Apostolou resumed the presidency. Over the next two months a protracted and often violent struggle ensued between workers and employers in which both local and foreign authorities were involved. One of the demands of the workers, that a contract between the employers and the international association should be drafted and deposited in the Office of the Mixed Court, sought to consolidate the standing of the union. Though the government claimed to be taking a neutral position, police played a critical role guarding the cigarette factories and escorting those not observing the strike to work. 247

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Despite some cracks in a united front of cigarette workers, the strike witnessed displays of solidarity from other workers. Following an initiative of the shoemakers’ and tailors’ international unions, a meeting attended by 1,500 people was held at the Birreria dell’Albero in support of the strikers. Speaking first in Greek, Nicolas Doumas exhorted cigarette workers to put aside peaceful means and, given the contemptuous behaviour of the authorities, respond with violent action. His comments were reinforced by Ugo Parrini, the leading Italian anarchist in Cairo, and an Arab cigarette worker ‘who did not speak as an anarchist but spoke with energy in his expression’. Doumas concluded with a rallying call to a demonstration which was broken up by the police on foot and horse.44 While the tactic was not new,45 the struggle of 1903 witnessed a determined and ultimately successful attempt on the part of the factory owners to exploit ethnic differences between workers and split their united front.46 They did this in two ways. First, they brought in unskilled, cheaper Egyptian and Syrian workers to act as strike breakers and second, they wooed certain Greek workers, some of them veterans of the 1899 strike, to set up a Union of Greek Workers as a rival to the International Union. In pursuing this latter tactic they propagated a crude nationalist line, stating effectively that ‘all Greek workers who stayed faithful to the strike would be considered as not belonging to the Greek nation because Greeks . . . were members of the Greek Association only.’47 By February 1904 after continued pressure, the strike collapsed. The Union was broken and those workers that returned to work did so on the employers’ terms. Some years of weakness followed this crushing defeat, due not only to the lack of unity and organization amongst the workers but also the deleterious effects of the introduction of cigarette machines into Egypt. It was not until 1908 that the fortunes of cigarette workers revived. In August of that year the International Union of the Workers of the Matossian Factory was founded followed two months later by the International Union of Cigarette Workers (Ligue Internationale des Ouvriers Cigarettiers et Papetiers du Caire). Announcements in the press appeared asking prospective members to enrol at a number of Greek cafés in different areas of Cairo. As in 1899, the union was open to all nationalities but unlike the union of the 1899 strike, these two international unions were open to all tobacco workers. This was particularly important as developments in the industry had seen an increasing specialization in the skills of cigarette workers, probably in part the result of the employers’ attempt to weaken the importance of individual workers, so that now gluers, cigarette makers, blenders, rollers, cutters and others were part of the manufacturing process. Greeks were still prominent among these workers, though less so than in earlier years,48 and there was again a significant Jewish presence within the leadership.49 With the union at Matossian and the International Union, cigarette workers now represented a united front of about 1,700 workmen.50 Employers had successfully played the ethnic card in 1903, dividing and co-opting cigarette workers to break the International Union, but more than five years later the coincidence of two meetings called on the same day presented a 248

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different picture. On Sunday 21 March 1909, a combined meeting of the International Union of Cigarette Workers and the Matossian Union was convened in Cairo, and another in Alexandria was scheduled by the Greek Association of Cigarette Workers, which was closely associated with the official Greek Community. At the Egyptian Theatre in Cairo, between 1,000 and 1,500 workers (reports vary) gathered to discuss the question of the introduction of cigarette machines. The issue was debated by a number of speakers and a committee of fourteen was set up to study the problem in detail. In Alexandria, the general assembly of the Greek Association failed for lack of a quorum.51 Since the establishment of the first Greek cigarette rollers association in Cairo fifteen years before, cigarette workers had come to realize that their greatest strength lay in organization and collective action that included members of all nationalities and from all sections of the cigarette manufacturing process.52 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the international union had become the leading association among cigarette workers in Cairo. Although the livelihood of cigarette worker would be drastically affected in the years after 1918 by the widespread use of cigarette machines, the recognition of common interest amongst foreign and Egyptian workers before 1914 is indicative of the internationalist perspective amongst the working class at this time.

The labour press It was not only in their syndicalist activities that the agency of internationalists was manifest. Mainstream newspapers had begun to reflect increasing concern with workers issues from the 1870s but the emerging labour and anarchist press provided a direct, public voice of workers, by workers and for workers. While there had been short-lived efforts before 1900, the bilingual (Italian/French) La Tribuna Libera-Le Tribune Libre published in Alexandria and whose chief editor was Joseph Rosenthal represents the first ongoing anarchist newspaper.53 A declared organ for the emancipation of the proletariat La Tribuna Libera presented discussions of anarchist principles and provided reports on the local and international workers’ movement. Stressing their credentials as workers, its editors pledged themselves to the ‘complete emancipation of moral–political– economic and social slavery’ of the workers of the world.54 Although the paper folded by the end of 1901 because of financial difficulties and the lack of support from Italian (though not Jewish and Greek) anarchists in Cairo, its role was taken up in the middle of 1902 by a more avowedly workers’ newspaper. L’Operaio, was an Italian language Alexandrian weekly which appeared over a period of nine months, reporting on international developments in the labour movement as well as addressing local issues affecting both foreign and Egyptian workers. It gave considerable coverage to the cabdrivers’ strike of 1903 which it hailed as ‘a great act of rebellion’ on the part of Egyptian workers.55 It also prided itself on being a forum for the contribution of workers themselves. Anarcho-syndicalist newspapers, mostly in Italian but also in French and Greek, continued to appear right 249

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up until 1914, perhaps reaching their most inclusive and mature form with L’Unione, a weekly published in both Cairo and Alexandria in 1913–1914. Although this press regularly referred to the interests and concerns of the Egyptian worker, it does not seem to have carried Arabic language material and therefore could not speak directly even to the literate Egyptian worker.56 Nevertheless, the mainstream Arabic language newspapers and periodicals did feature regular items on anarchist thought, the development of anarchism in Europe and reports on the local industrial scene so that such information and ideas were being circulated amongst a wider public. In addition, an active pamphlet literature, mostly in Greek, addressed workers’ issues and demonstrated a sustained commitment to publication. Asterides had published an important pamphlet in 1900 titled Capital – Work or Property – Money that dealt with the situation of labour in Egypt in the aftermath of the cigarette strike of 1899.57 In a series of dialogues published by the Labour Library (Ethniki Vivliothiki) in 1910 and 1911, Doumas discussed the relationship between the capitalist system and the workers whom he characterized as ‘the tortured’.58 Under the Mask a radical pamphlet written by another worker, Stavros Kouchtsoglou, appeared soon after under the imprint of the Anarchist Club and criticized private property and the exploitation of the workers.59

The Free Popular University A central plank of the anarchist program was that the emancipation of the individual lay with the education of the masses. One of the most ambitious expressions of this strategy was the establishment of the Free Popular University (Università Popolare Libera) (henceforth UPL) which opened its doors in Alexandria at the end of May 1901.60 Some months in the planning, the UPL was organized by a small group of anarchists inspired by institutions of the same name established in Italy. In Egypt, however, it took on its own particular character that reflected its libertarian and internationalist origins. Its constitution committed the UPL to being an independent institution free from any ‘interference, competition or patronage of any authority’. Characterized by ‘fraternity and mutual tolerance’ it was open to all with no restrictions on nationality, language, religion, gender, or political, literary or scientific opinions. This staunchly secularist, internationalist and anti-authoritarian position contrasted with the majority of educational institutions in Egypt that were under the formal control of the Egyptian government, foreign states, community bodies or religious authorities. The UPL was open to all but its principal target audience was the popular classes. It sought to provide working men and women with an opportunity to become familiar with literature and the new scientific ideas by holding free classes in the evenings six times a week when workers could attend. Most of the classes were delivered in Italian or French language but, at least during the first year, regular classes on language and literature were also given in Arabic. As well as a wide range of courses on science, arts and literature, the UPL offered subjects relevant to the 250

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work situation and the specific needs of workers. Lectures were given on topics such as ‘Workmen’s Organizations in Modern Law’, ‘Hygiene at Work’ and ‘Strikes and the Labour Movement’. Here, too, the Egyptian worker was not neglected with ‘Abduh Badran, editor of al-Sabah, speaking in Arabic on ‘The Worker’. Initially the UPL attracted support from a wide range of liberals and progressives from across the full spectrum of ethnic and religious communities, and a significant section of the European and Arabic language press. However, it failed to fulfil the expectations of its founders. Soon after its opening the UPL became embroiled in a scandal about remarks made by a lecturer, Curti-Garzoni, regarded as supporting the assassination of King Umberto of Italy. He and another anarchist were subsequently prosecuted by the Italian consular court and the UPL was publicly branded a subversive institution. In the following months, the anarchist element on the governing committee was increasingly marginalized and more respectable sober members of the local bourgeoisie took control changing the tone and direction of the institution. A similar enterprise to establish a UPL in Cairo was even less successful. A provisional founding committee was set up around an anarchist nucleus in coalition with a number of liberals but this time the opposition, which again included the Italian authorities and, it was alleged, a member of the royal family, was more organized and a campaign against the UPL forced the abandonment of the project. Following this reverse, anarchist groups preferred a series of more modest study and discussion groups as a forum for the dissemination of radical secularist and libertarian ideas. In Cairo an International Reading Room (Sala di Lettura Internazionale) was established which made collections of radical literature, periodicals and newspapers available to readers in June 1902. Other similar, ventures were pursued both in Alexandria and Cairo throughout the decade.61 In the summer of 1907, a series of meetings convened in Cairo by a group calling itself Gli Operai (‘The Workers’) was attended by Greek, Italian, Jewish and Egyptian workers. Its program called for the establishment of an International Reading Room where scientific, philosophical, political and social publications would be collected in every language and made available to readers. A committee of Greek, Jewish and native workers was formed and a course of instructive lectures for workers was planned.62

An internationalist discourse The diverse pattern of industrial militancy, press activity and educational endeavours give us a good idea of the values and discursive practice of the internationalist labour movement. These centred around a number of interrelated themes: solidarity among all workers and the need to unite and organize, brotherly love, defence of the rights of workers, the predatory nature of the capitalist, the freedom and independence of the worker, and resistance to political authority. Above all, the resounding call to workers was to unite as the most effective way to defend their rights and livelihood. Following the cigarette workers’ 251

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victory of February 1900, a pamphleteer called for a grander unity among cigarette workers. See to the amalgamation of the remaining cigarette workers, if possible from Alexandria to Sudan, for the empowerment of the organization, bearing in mind that if the contract be modified, if the factory owners should yield their neck to your demands, if and if, all these ifs, are due to your strength in the International Union and the existence of the organization.63 In the pages of the labour newspaper Ergasia, Asterides further extolled the importance of organization and unity as the basis for ‘happiness’ and the prosperity of workers.64 For Vasilios Kalliarekos professional love was at the centre of workers’ organization, The aim of the organization of the working classes, indeed formerly and today is as sacred as it is great, and a means to the attainment of the ‘Love of the Members of each profession’. Through Love we will be able to successfully confront the misfortune with which Capital oppresses us.65 ‘Gli Operai’ called for the creation of ‘harmony and goodness for the working class’ but went further, ‘We want all workers and all friends to come and work with us for the freedom of labour . . . We want the worker to know his rights. We want to lift bad and brutish ideas from the worker. We want the worker to be free.’66 This emphasis on the rights of the worker was not only common to the educational efforts of anarchists at the UPL but was employed during industrial disputes when workers’ rights and ‘just demands’ were regularly invoked.67 During a strike at the Matossian cigarette factory which had been prompted by the dismissal of eight workers, a journalist from a Greek newspaper interviewed a Greek worker, asking in perhaps a suggestively narrow communal tone how many Greeks had been dismissed. The worker replied that only one had been but that ‘we have to uphold their rights.’68 The evil nature of capitalism features as a consistent theme in this literature. While Kalliarekos waxed over the virtues of brotherly love he also spoke of ‘the war of labour against capital’.69 Asteridis likened the employers to savage animals, ‘Wild beasts are tamed, gentlemen, but the factory owners will never be tamed . . . only power originating from the organisation can tame the factory owners . . . ’.70 In the pages of Phos, employers were accused of being ‘the best apostles of anarchy and socialism through their . . . improper behaviour towards their workers’ because they used the ‘law of hunger’ to cow the workers in a way that ‘stands wholly contrary to the laws of the great and all-powerful Lawmaker of Nature’. The paper predicted that the aggressive and inhuman tactics of the employers would lead to the development of a labour movement that would defend the rights of labour as it had done in Europe. It noted with some assurance, 252

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‘Happily in Cairo some years ago a movement of fraternisation of the working classes began to be observed and after not many years the city of the Caliphs will be one of the first socialist centres on account of its international character.’71 The founding principles of the UPL had stressed the importance of independence from other forms of political, economic and religious authority. Attempts to set up a united labour federation and a work exchange were part of this strategy to establish a relative economic autonomy. In the brutal confrontations between strikers and the representatives of the state, particularly the police, the anarchist view of the state as a repressive institution seem to be confirmed. This need to resist authority was regularly raised at workers’ meetings, no more so than in December 1903, where a violent response was urged to counter the violence employed by the authorities.72 Confrontation with political authority remained a favoured theme. In January 1911 at a meeting of cigarette workers Carlo Affé sought to rouse the audience: ‘Cigarette workers, do not fear the police, authority, governments or the king. When you fight for your rights, if the police react, you also should react.’73 In the pages of L’Unione, the critical importance of the common struggle of all workers regardless of religion, ethnicity or nationality in the struggle against capital reached its clearest expression with the editors stressing the common interest, common enemy and common welfare of all workers. Divisions, particularly between European and Egyptian workers, could only benefit the capitalist. Let us not forget that . . . capital is our common enemy, both of the European worker and the native worker. Neglected by us the native element can become an unconscious collaborator of the capitalist, an obstacle that would break our efforts, rendering futile our future struggles. Labour has no frontiers or language. Therefore we make no issue of nationality, of religion, of race. All feel the same needs, all suffer the same grief; all have one sole aspiration: their own well-being, which cannot be other than the result of the common well-being.74 These sentiments recognized the challenge not only from capitalism but from other political forces that were seeking to attract the loyalty and support of the working class. The two main rivals were Egyptian nationalists who attempted to rally Egyptian workers to their cause and the bourgeois leadership of local ethnic-national communities who aimed to keep ‘their’ working class within the bosom of the community. (The British and their local allies also had a more diffuse interest in keeping the European and Egyptian workers separate.) In the late nineteenth-century nationalists like Muhammad Farid had initially labelled the phenomenon of labour militancy in Egypt as a European disease. By the first decade of the twentieth century nationalists had come to realize the political potential of the workers and sought to co-opt them to the national struggle.75 The support of the National Party for the formation of the Manual Trade Workers’ Union in 1909, a union with an underlying nationalist outlook that included 253

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a wide spectrum of workers, including cigarette workers, was a clear challenge to the international unions.76 Though the National Party could speak in positive terms of the unity between Egyptian and European workers at times, as it did during the Cairo tram strikes in 1908 and 1911,77 the construction of bourgeois nationalism by the effendiyya saw a steady process of ‘indigenization’ of the Egyptian working class during this period.78 The other main challenge to the internationalists for the allegiance of the foreign worker was the local national communities. Some organizations of foreign workers were dominated by their ethnic identity and found organizational support under the auspices of local community institutions or the legal protection of foreign nationality. The clearest example of this was the Greek community where the power, wealth and influence of the Egyptian Greek bourgeoisie made the strategy of co-opting the Greek working class to its interests most plausible. This was most successfully done in Alexandria where the institutional Greek Community (Kinotita) was controlled by a wealthy middle class with extensive financial investment in the cotton and other industries. Employing substantial largesse the Kinotita sponsored the establishment of a whole range of economic and cultural bodies in an attempt to keep all Greeks under one roof and within its sphere of influence. Chief amongst these was the Greek Chamber of Commerce established in 1901 with cotton grandee Emmanuel Benakis as its president. More significantly it sponsored a number of workers associations, such as the ‘Holy Trinity’ Association of Greek Employees (established 1902), the Society of Greek Artisans (1907), the Association of Greek Cigarette Makers (1896 or 1899) and the Greek Association of Tobacco Cutters (1907). The patron–client relationship between these associations was clear: they were a means for the ruling oligarchy of the community to patronize and control the working class. It is no accident that in 1909 the president of the two Greek workers’ organizations connected with the cigarette industry, Demosthenes Tamvakopoulos, was also the Secretary of the Greek Chamber of Commerce and sat on the committee of the Kinotita in Alexandria.79 As we have seen, in the period before 1914 the Greek bourgeoisie was only partially successful in this endeavour and the tension between communal and class affiliation continued to be a factor amongst Greek workers right up until the late 1950s.80 Amongst other communities such as the Italians, Armenians and Maltese, where the institutional community was less well developed there was likely similar if less structured forces operating.

Conclusion The internationalist trend among workers in Egypt before 1914 has an important record of militant agitation on the factory floor and political expression in the press. Influenced by a core of anarcho-syndicalist ideas it was also inspired by a commitment to internationalism, brotherhood and self-help as a way to defend the collective interests and rights of the worker, to combat the predations of capitalism and to oppose the malevolent authority of the state. These strategies of resistance, 254

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organization and industrial action were perhaps most influential in the new industries of cigarette making and printing but they were also found in occupations that were not new but were modernizing, such as the shoemaking. Far from being a labour elite or members of privileged and insular communities more concerned with their own affairs and developments abroad, many foreign workers in Egypt sought to organize on the basis of class affiliation and were committed to the improvement in the conditions of all workers, both foreign and Egyptian. Workers of international outlook were challenged by competing political forces and ideologies that sought to organize, control and contain emergent labour. Aware of the dangers posed by a multinational labour movement, employers and state authorities moved to repress it during industrial action by using wedge tactics, deporting ringleaders and more abstractly by promoting one or another nationalist discourse. Within the cigarette industry alone, these different tendencies competed with one another though the dominant tendency in Cairo before the First World War was the internationalist current. During the First World War the development of the labour movement was stifled and by 1919 the political landscape had shifted significantly but not wholly in favour of the nationalist movement. Anarcho-syndicalism in Egypt and elsewhere went into decline but radical labour activism was channelled into the communist movement where foreigners and foreign workers would again play an important part. Indeed, right up into the Nasser period, foreign workers in specialized sectors in Egypt continued to be active within progressive labour politics. The phenomenon of the international union and anarcho-syndicalism in Egypt interrogates the standard foreign–nationalist dichotomy and illuminates the political contest for the allegiance of the worker. In a consideration of the subaltern and the dynamics of social protest, the cooperation between foreign and Egyptian workers constitutes a case of subaltern agency with class resistance employing a non-national, internationalist discourse. In this framework, the world of the foreign worker was defined not as separate from that of the native worker but as a common part of the same Egyptian reality.

Notes 1 A comprehensive listing of this literature is not possible here but among the more important works are Ellis Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986; Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954. London: I.B. Tauris, 1988; Zachary Lockman (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East, Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994; D. Quataert and E. Zürcher (eds), Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, 1839–1950, London: I.B. Tauris Press, 1995 and Ellis Goldberg (ed.), The Social History of Labor in the Middle East, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 2 Among Egyptian works, for example, are Amin Izz al-Din, Tarikh al-tabaqa al-‘amila al-misriyya mundhu nashatahaa hatta thawrat 1919, Cairo, 1967 and Ra’uf ‘Abbas, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliyya al-misriyya fi misr, 1899–1952, Cairo, 1967.

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3 The exception to this latter generalization is work on the labour movement in Palestine in the mandatory period that has sought to explore interrelations between Jewish and Arab workers such as Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, but see Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000 which emphasizes the split nature of the labour market. More recent work has examined specific sites of workers’ experience and less organized and dramatic phenomena than unions and strikes, see Quataert and Zürcher, Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, 1839–1950, 1995. 4 ‘Some male dwellers who got their hands dirty were not Egyptian. Most of them were Greeks or Italians, and a few were of other nationalities. Although these men were part of the working class in the classical Marxist framework, they were not usually considered workers by Egyptians. Their wages were usually higher and they often had more responsible positions; as long as foreigners could claim extraterritorial privileges, these men were subject, not to Egyptian law, but to the law of their home country. They may, in one sense, have shared the class situation of Egyptians, but they were of a different social status . . . [and] were not routinely thought of as an organic part of the Egyptian proletariat.’ Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Textile Worker, 190 n.1. 5 The concept of a labour aristocracy was first applied to that class of worker in midnineteenth-century England, usually identified with artisans (as opposed to labourers), who enjoyed better wages and working conditions, greater job security and prospects for promotion, in short, a better standard of living. A rather conservative force co-opted by the bourgeoisie, they lost status with the introduction of machines and changing management practices and merged towards the end of the century with the working class and gravitated towards the Labour Party. See Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 272–315, 318–28. 6 See, for example, Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, esp. 36–7, 41. The authors’ repeated use of the word ‘emulate’ (37, 49, 56) to characterize the response of Egyptian workers to the activities of foreign workers suggests admiration as well as rivalry. At times their explanations for the motives of foreign workers seems contradictory: at one point they explain the unionization of foreign workers as part of a strategy to exclude cheaper Egyptian labour [55] but elsewhere suggest the inclusion of Egyptian workers in a union was motivated by a desire to deprive the employer of a pool of cheaper indigenous workers [107]. Since the publication of Workers on the Nile, Beinin and Lockman (separately) have modified their views of the constitution and conceptualization of the Egyptian working class and how it might be understood although there has been little reconsideration of the foreign worker, see Zachary Lockman (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East, Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. 7 Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 36. 8 The locus classicus of this view applied to the late Ottoman period is A. J. Sussnitzki’s study (translated in Charles Issawi (ed.), The Economic History of the Middle East 1800–1914, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 115–25) some of whose categorizations border on racial stereotypes. 9 Quoted in Issawi, Economic History, 114. 10 Athanase G. Politis, L’Hellénisme et L’Egypte Moderne, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930, Vol. 2, 82–5. 11 The relationship between the guilds and the new labour associations cannot be dealt with here save to note that there appears to be a scholarly consensus that guilds significantly declined if not disappeared over the following two decades. Cole’s discussion of the shoemakers’ guild in Cairo in 1879 indicates that foreign and Egyptian workers could be members of the same guild but his interpretation that the split between the

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12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31

two was an expression of the religious nature of the guild and suggests a struggle between local and foreign shoemakers should be treated cautiously since an international union of shoemakers was established in 1901; Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East, Princeton, NJ, 1993, 185–6; Gabriel Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times, Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1964. The anarchist movement in Egypt has received little attention in the scholarly literature but see Leonardo Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, Florence: Editrice, 1976, Vol. 2, 281–8. The terms anarchism and anarchist will be used here although in the 1860s and 1870s (the period of the First International) these activists were usually referred to as internationalists. The term anti-authoritarian socialist is used to distinguish the anarchist trend led by Bakunin from those that supported Marx and Engels, the so-called authoritarian socialists. For a fuller discussion of the anarchist movement in Egypt, see my forthcoming paper, ‘Anarchism in Egypt before the First World War’, in Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1880–1940, 2008. Pier C. Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiana, da Bakunin a Malatesta, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969, 196–7. Amilcare Cipriani (1844–1918) was one of the key figures of revolutionary politics in the second half of the nineteenth century and represented Italy at the foundation of the International in September 1864. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was an Italian politician of democratic, republican and at least early on in his public life, quite radical views. Although associated with the First International, the religious element in his politics clashed with classical Marxism. The International Working Men’s Association (or First International) was set up by workers in London and Paris in 1864 with Marx and Engels played a leading role in its organization and activities. Bettini, Bibliografia, 282n. These names are given in Greek sources, respectively I Omonoia, O Proodos and O Anamorphosis. Phos, 7 July, 14 July 1909; al-Muqattam, 12 July 1909. Phos, 23 March 1909. Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Ambasciata d’Italia in Egitto (henceforth MAE AIE) No. 88, corres., 29 May 1902. MAE AIE No. 126, corres., 8 August 1910. Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 54. See, for example, the listing of union leaders in al-Ahram, 24 December 1901. Egyptian Gazette, 26 March 1902. Despite the considerable scholarship on the Jewish community in Egypt, almost nothing has appeared dealing with Jewish workers or anarchists. The view that Jews in Egypt had little to do with anarchism (Jacob Landan, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, London, 1969, 115) needs to be rethought. For the following see various correspondence in MAE AIE No. 107. For the following see Yannis Kordatos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, Athens, 1972, 175–6; and various corres. in MAE AIE No. 107. Tilegraphos, 26 December 1901. In 1922 the shoemakers were represented by a Greek and (probably) an Egyptian, FO 141/779/9321. See, for example, MAE AIE No. 107, corres., 28 May, 6 June 1907. In his study of workers in large industry in Egypt before the First World war, Jean Vallet gives the ratio of local and Ottoman workers to foreign workers of all nationalities as 10:5:1 though he makes clear that the former category includes Greeks and Armenians from Asia Minor, Contribution a l’étude de la condition des ouvriers au Caire, Valence: Valentinoise, 1911, 5–7. Panagiotis Noutsos, I Sosialistiki Skepsi stin Ellada apo to 1875 os to 1974, Vol. 1, Athens: Gnosi, 1990, 98; Pandelis Michalis Glavanis, ‘Aspects of the Economic and

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32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48

49

50 51 52

53

Social History of the Greek Community in Alexandria during the Nineteenth Century’, PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 1989, 408. See for example Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 50ff. For contemporary sources on this dispute see the Egyptian Gazette. These included respectively Solomon Goldenberg and Muhammad Sidqi, Kordatos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, 174n. This, along with the fact that a number of anarchists were leading the strike, make it clear that the dispute was not simply ‘an instance of class conflict within the Greek community in Egypt’ (the view of Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 51). Egyptian Gazette, 27 January 1900. Egyptian Gazette, 16 January 1900. Egyptian Gazette, 24 January 1900. Egyptian Gazette, 22 February 1900. For a statement of accounts, see Tilegraphos, 3 December 1901. If the monthly subscription per member was 5pt these figures suggest a membership of 2000. Beinin and Lockman’s assertion (Workers of the Nile, 51) that after the strike the Union ‘played no effective role and was apparently defunct by 1902’ should therefore be rejected out of hand. Tilegraphos, 26 December 1901. MAE AIE No. 88 corres, Machell to Manzoni, 16 December 1901. Tilegraphos, 20 December 1901, al-Ahram 20 December 1901. MAE AIE No. 88 corres, 6 January 1902. See various reports in Tachydromos July 1902. il Libertario, ‘Dall’Egitto’, 31 December 1903. See, for example, the description of the conflict as ‘a racial industrial war’ (Egyptian Gazette 14 December 1901) and the editorial ‘A Word of Warning’, Egyptian Gazette, 21 December 1901 which portrays the strike at Soussa as a sign of the dangerous divisions between European and Egyptian workers. Of many newspaper accounts, ‘I Apergia ton Sigaropoion’, Ethniki 24 January 1904 quoting an article from Journal du Caire provides the clearest statement of this tactic. See also Kordatos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, 175n. Phos, 1 April 1909. During the strike at Matossian in March 1909 Greeks numbered fifty of a total workforce of more than a 100 and probably 200, the rest being made up of ‘Syrians, Arabs and Armenians’, Phos, 12 March 1909 (The figure of 200 comes from Vallet, Contribution, 143.) These included Solomon Goldenburg and Joseph Daniel, owner-manager of the Bosphoros Hotel in Matariyya, ‘Ergatika’, Phos, 30 October 1908. The assertion by Lockman (‘ “Worker” and “Working Class” in pre-1914 Egypt: A Rereading’, 94) that the international union was ‘dominated by, and intended primarily to defend the interests of, the largely Greek rollers’ should therefore be rejected on two counts. By 1911 the Matossian union had 200 members and the Ligue 1500, Vallet, Contribution, 143. O Neilos, 25 March 1909. A similar trajectory which lies outside our period was followed by the union representing the workers of the Suez Canal. First known as Phoenix when it was formed by only Greek workers of the Suez Canal Company, it later expanded its membership to include other company workers and then more generally a whole range of canal workers and changed its name to the International Workers Union of the Isthmus of Suez, achieving significant success for its members in the years after the First World War, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 106–10. Rosenthal was at the beginning of a long commitment to radical politics and is perhaps best known for his central role in the establishment of the Egyptian Socialist Party in 1921.

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54 La Tribuna Libera, 20 October 1901. 55 ‘La Coscienza Indigena’, L’Operaio, 11 April 1903. 56 However, it is not impossible that some issues carried contributions from Egyptians since such articles appeared in the pages of an Italian anarchist newspaper, il Libertario (La Spezia). 57 Kephalio – Ergasia i Ktima – Chrima, Cairo, 1900. 58 Nicholas Doumas, I Morphosis ton Vasanismenon, Dialogos metaxi Ergaton, Ergatiki Vivliothiki, Cairo, 1911. 59 Stavros Kouchtsoglou, Kato I Maska, Omilos Anarchikon [Anarchists’ Club], Cairo, 1912. 60 For the following, see my paper, ‘Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901)’, Middle Eastern Studies, 41(3) (2005): 303–20. 61 MAE AIE No. 86, ‘Circolo libertario anarchico in Cairo’. 62 MAE AIE No. 107, corres. 28 May, 6 June, 3 September 1907. 63 Quoted in Kordatos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, 175n. 64 Published in Tilegraphos, 28 December 1901. 65 Tilegraphos, 26 December 1901 quoting Ergasia. 66 MAE AIE No. 107, corres., 6 June 1907. 67 See for example the cigarette workers’ dispute in Alexandria in March 1902, Egyptian Gazette, 21–26 March 1902. 68 Phos, 12 March 1909. 69 Tilegraphos, 26 December 1901, quoting from Ergasia. 70 Quoted in Kordatos, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, 175n. 71 Phos, 11 March 1909. 72 il Libertario ‘Dall’Egitto’, 31 December 1903. 73 MAE AIE No. 120, corres., 14 May 1911. 74 L’Unione, 13 July 1913. 75 For a good discussion of this process, see Lockman, ‘Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914’, Poetics Today, 15(1994): 157–90. 76 On this see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 66–72. 77 Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 177. 78 Lockman, ‘Imagining the Working Class’, 184. 79 For a listing of these organizations in K. Kapralos, Imerologia, 1909, 278–88. 80 For the record of the post-war Greek left in Egypt, see Anthony Gorman, ‘Egypt’s Forgotten Communists: the Postwar Greek Left’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 20(2002): 1–27.

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Part VI SUBALTERNS AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

11 FROM NATIONAL HEROES TO NATIONAL VILLAINS Bandits, pirates and the formation of modern Greece Gerassimos Karabelias

If crime and criminals constitute a useful tool for a society to distinguish proper and socially acceptable conduct from that which is improper and unacceptable,1 the presence of Greek bandits in the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece can serve as a compass for understanding the country’s initial formation and subsequent evolution. Products of a rugged terrain where sheep breeding and stealing as well as a martial ethos coexisted for centuries, these bandit groups constituted the backbone of the Greek nation in sustaining a revolutionary war against the occupying Ottoman forces. However, the attitude of Greek political and military leaders and that of the representatives of foreign powers towards these bandits was not as honest as official history books often claim. Although the former did not hesitate to employ or even exploit the services of bandit leaders and their followers for a variety of assignments, especially for satisfying the irredentist dream of people both inside and outside the borders of the Greek state, they were equally quick to paint a dark picture of these groups, presenting them as common robbers and criminals and seeking their exemplary punishment. By contrast, the shepherds and peasants, who had suffered considerably from the depredations of these bands, could not hide their admiration for the latter’s accomplishments against the unjust and oppressive local government and central administration. An indisputable witness of the peasants’ warm feelings towards these bandits is the corpus of magnificent songs and poems glorifying their actions that exists in the oral and written tradition of modern Greece.

Banditry in Ottoman-occupied Greek lands Despite the influence of the Classical Greek and Roman world on the development of the modern Greek society and state, it was the breakdown of the Byzantine 263

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Empire and the establishment of Ottoman rule over Greek lands lasting almost 400 years which had the greatest effect. Nowhere was this more visible than in the political arena. Although a number of surviving members of the Byzantine Emperor’s family and the remnants of the aristocracy were forced to seek refuge in Western Europe, the rest of the elite were, willingly or not, incorporated into the socio-political structure of the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the people were left without legitimate political leaders, be they individuals or groups, who could assist them in their attempts to preserve traditional politics and who might even lead their war for liberation. Furthermore, with the implementation of the Ottoman religious– communal, socio-political millet system,2 the fragmentation of the Greek community was aggravated as this system favoured the emergence of a large number of strong local military and political leaders to the detriment of Greek unity. Two were the institutions with the potential of performing adequately the role of national leadership: the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople,3 the head of all Christian Orthodox subjects of the Empire, and the class of wealthy Greek merchants. The location of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the capital, however, facilitated the Ottomans in their task of controlling his religious, social, economic and political activities. In addition, the Patriarch’s strong anti-Catholic orientation guaranteed to the central authority that the Ottoman polity would be highly respected among Greek subjects in contrast to attitudes among Christians in Western Europe.4 As for the wealthy merchant class, it equally failed to produce a national political leader. Although it played a positive role in the Ottoman Empire’s later disintegration, it could not succeed in establishing an underground political structure capable of preserving the political unity of the Greek community. The traders had no real experience in warfare and considered war either too costly or too dangerous a technique to master. Their main interest was the accumulation of profits.5 As a result, they had felt comfortable with the Ottoman political system, especially as holders of foreign passports. When the central government and the political system finally became an obstacle to their financial and political ambitions, then the dissolution of the Empire became part of their greater concern. Under the circumstances, the idea of forming a Greek state seemed an illusionary adventure. However, the seeds for a limited guerrilla warfare against the representatives of the central authority had already been planted. During the lengthy decades of Ottoman occupation, a large number of local armed units had been formed among different communities including among the Greeks.6 A ‘product of insecurity of life and property, conquest and foreign rule, and a terrain and economy that favoured lawlessness in general and brigandage in particular’,7 these armed groups, whose members were motivated to fight the Ottoman authorities more by personal gain than national aspirations,8 constituted the foundation for the Greek national liberation forces. They have been classified as klepht, armatoloi and kapoi. The klepht, Koliopoulos argues, ‘were mainly fugitives, debtors, outlaws, misfits, adventurers, victims of oppression, men not attached to the land by

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property or other obligations, who’ unable to cope with the evolution of events in their local community, ‘took to the hills and became brigands’.9 They greatly esteemed the skilful use of arms and the open or veiled defiance of established authority. Their ethos stressed personal honour, bravery, resistance to hunger and torture, unusual physical prowess and generosity towards the weak.10 The leader of the band (kapetanios) and his assistants (protopalikara) were highly respected, admired and even feared by their fellow members.11 Although professional military characteristics such as discipline were weak, it was the ability of the kapetonios to protect the well-being of his followers that determined the size of the band and the level of obedience to his commands. As their reputation as klephts and their chance for receiving an amnesty offer from the Ottomans depended upon their ability to spread fear in local state authorities and populations, they were driven to their physical and mental limits in order to reach the highest level of a respected–feared outlaw.12 As for armatoloi, they were the only non-Muslim group of people in the Ottoman Empire who were officially allowed to bear arms. More often than not, they were former klepht amnestied by the central authorities on the condition that they would protect the state by leading a group of armed men against all bandits, misfits and outlaws in a certain region. The leader was expected to display the same characteristics as the leader of a klephtic band but to be more strict on the issue of discipline. As the practice of sending a thief to catch a thief13 while keeping the standing army fresh and ready for battle seemed quite practical and financially appropriate to the Ottoman authorities, the armatoloi became the state’s only Christian militia, although limited to a local level. But ‘unlike klephtism’, as Petropulos remarks, ‘armatolism included communities of people, not just bands and individual leaders. The region policed by a group of armatoloi was known as an armatolik . . . enjoy[ed] complete autonomy, which meant being spared any resident Ottoman officials or Turkish settlers. The leader . . . ruled as well as protected his village or group of villagers’ from the activities of the outlaws and the jealous eye of other armatoloi.14 Some of these leaders became directly involved in the collection of taxes from the local population and even engaged in other professional, legal or illegal, activities in the areas of farming and commerce.15 As their civil–military position became gradually hereditary, powerful regional dynasties emerged, especially in the lands of central Greece.16 Famous ex-klephts were not employed only by the Ottomans as armatoloi, but by wealthy, local Christian primates as bodyguards, known as kapoi. They differed from the armatoloi regarding their employers and their duties as well as the extent of their power. As Petropulos points out, the kapoi ‘policed the lands of the primate and asserted the primate’s authority . . . [Although] sometimes [they] took on the chief duty of an armatolos, namely pursuit of brigands . . . [their] chief [unlike the armatolos chieftain] was in no sense a ruler.’17 Well-known kapoi who later on became leading figures of the Greek war of liberation were Theodoros Kolokotronis, Demetrios Koliopoulos, Niketas Stamatellopoulos and Vassilis Petimezas.

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Even though this account has separated these armed guerrilla-groups into three different categories, their boundaries were not as strict as this division implies. ‘The distinction between klepht and armatoloi’, Koliopoulos points out, ‘was blurred by the frequent exchange of roles . . . in a security system which essentially aimed at relative, not absolute, security . . . Accusations that captains of armatoloi were slow in suppressing the predators in order to render their services indispensable and stay in power were seldom without foundation . . . the existence and operation of klepthic bands were necessary for the existence and operation of the armatolic bands.’18 At the same time, the presence of these armed guerrilla groups was regarded as an indispensable device for the implementation of the Sultan’s rule in the periphery. By favouring socio-political stability, the central government had permitted the presence of these groups in order to counterbalance the abuses of power by local religious dignitaries, both Muslim and Christian. But, whenever the military power of these bands exceeded the limits of the system of relative security, the central government would not hesitate to move against and punish them severely.19 Whether as klephts, armatoloi or kapoi, the military leaders were extremely sensitive to two issues: the size of the group of armed men under their command and the degree of the men’s loyalty. Aware of the impact of size on the attitudes of political, financial and military circles at local as well as at regional level, these leaders (the Kapetanioi) usually built their group around a nucleus of kinsmen or people whom they considered absolutely trustworthy.20 The expansion of the size and power of each group depended upon the leader’s capacity to protect and enhance the well-being of his military subordinates as well as his civilian clients.21 In a world dominated by insecurity and peril, the development of strong patron–client relations seemed the only socio-political mechanism left for survival.22 Hence, despite their shortcomings as far as the maltreatment of the Greek peasants is concerned,23 men who bore arms in such difficult times were highly respected by the agrarian population.24 A clear example of the admiration that the simple people had for the bandits and their groups can be found in the huge corpus of klephtic ballads that has been passed orally from generation to generation as part of Greek culture.25

Piracy in the Ottoman-occupied Greek lands The strong dislike of the Ottomans towards the sea and sea-related professions and their defeat by the naval forces of western Europe in 1571 offered a unique opportunity for conquered Greek seamen to maintain their skills in commercial and military naval activities. Products of either barren or pirate-stricken islands, the Greeks had naturally turned to the sea as the only means of survival. Their traditional fame as seamen helped them find a place in various naval and commercial forces that were active around the Mediterranean and especially in the Aegean Sea. For instance, the Greeks constituted one of the largest groups in the Ottoman commercial and battle fleets.26 Some of them, like the 266

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Barbaros brothers, even succeeded in reaching the highest position, that of the leader (Admiral) of the Ottoman fleet. In addition, Greek seamen offered their services to the Venetian, Austrian, French, British and Russian naval forces.27 The collaboration with the Austrians, British and Russians helped Greek seamen in various ways. It helped them to accumulate some capital through seizing cargoes and providing much needed supplies to blockaded areas. Since the Greeks, with the possible exception of Maniates,28 were not professional pirates but seamen and merchants, their income, large or small, was always invested in ships, trade and smuggling. The nature of their profession and the insecurity of the sea-trade made the majority of them aware of the evolution of events in the international arena and capable of interpreting treaties in a manner favourable to themselves. Furthermore, the raids of Greek pirates and corsairs provided valuable general experience at sea as well as in naval warfare activities. Their raids against the Ottomans, under the protection of the Russian flag although still subjects of the Sultan, increased the Greek seamen’s confidence in their abilities and helped them to believe that they could play a major role in the country’s liberation struggle.29 Following the tradition of klepht and armatoloi, discipline among Greek pirates and corsairs was weak. The level of obedience to a captain’s commands and the size of his crew were determined by the captain’s skills in naval warfare, his ability to increase the income of his crew and to gain the protection of foreign powers. The nature of piracy had forced most captains to employ as sailors their immediate relatives and extended family or people from their native island. The well-being of a large number of families was thus in the hands of a single man, the captain, the latter acting as the political and financial patron of all.30 The development of strong patron–client relations between the captain and his sailors not only assisted the formation of a powerful mercantile aristocracy both within and beyond the Ottoman lands, but it also became a serious obstacle to the creation of a unified leadership in the Greek naval forces.

The role of bandits and pirates in the war for liberation (1821–1827) The presence of a large number of regionally powerful military groups and leaders in the Greek lands, their high degree of heterogeneity and lack of discipline in conjunction with the absence of a nationally accepted military leader, was bound to raise issues of unity, hierarchical order and direction in a community in revolt. Certainly, few doubted the willingness of the military and regional leaders to participate in a war for liberation against the Ottoman forces, as they had done in several instances before 1821.31 However, equally few believed that these leaders would look sympathetically on the idea of relinquishing military and political power in their area to another man or institution. These leaders had fought hard against both the Ottomans and against rival armed groups to reach their position. What they expected from their participation in the war for liberation against the Ottomans was, among other things, the augmentation of 267

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their own political, financial and military power as well as that of their clients to the detriment of rival military and political groups and leaders.32 This self-centred attitude of military leaders ought not to come as a surprise. The lengthy occupation of Greek lands by the Ottomans had had an enormous effect upon the native political culture. The Greeks had succeeded in incorporating into their own culture the central role of the state as illustrated by the Empire’s social, political and financial evolution.33 In a country where the administration formed during the war for liberation was too primitive to prevent illicit profiteering and the government appeared unwilling to allow the presence of independent, profitable economic enterprises, the direct integration of military leaders into the sociopolitical formation of the new state was viewed as a viable and extremely profitable economic activity for them and their clients.34 But, as control of the state was interpreted as a ‘zero-sum’ game, being excluded appeared fatal for a military leader and his followers. Hence, these leaders felt that they had to fight hard, against both the Ottomans and their Greek antagonists, for a place in the new political formation. Furthermore, given their traditional hostility towards the Ottoman government and its representatives, it seems rather natural to expect these military leaders to welcome the creation of a new and strong state only for as long as it remained under their own direction.35 The absence of a nationally accepted, all-powerful military leader, the inability of the newly formed revolutionary government to enforce its decisions upon civilian and military leaders at a local level, and the increasing demand for fighters in the ongoing war with the Ottoman forces, offered a unique opportunity for military personnel to augment their own authority and value in the eyes of the people. These military figures, taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the temporary withdrawal of the Ottomans from the Greek lands, involved themselves, in the middle of the war for liberation, in a process of settling old scores with local primates and rival regional military groups.36 The eruption of civil strife only a year after the outbreak of the revolution weakened considerably the firepower of the revolutionary forces and caused irreversible harm to the political power of the military leaders. Their failure to liberate the country from the Ottoman yoke was to make them and their followers easy prey for both native politico-economic leaders and the representatives of foreign powers. Indeed, the process by which the military leaders were subordinated to the political will of non-military personnel had begun because of the former’s inability to finance successful military campaigns against the Ottomans.37 Since the possession of financial resources was a prerequisite for both the political and military power of military leaders,38 a lack of such resources made the latter extremely vulnerable to pressures exercised by a variety of non-military leaders as well as representatives of foreign powers.39 Hence, wealthy ship owners from the Greek islands (especially Hydra and Spetses), powerful local primates from the Peloponnesus, and members of the Greek diaspora felt that they were in a position to demand a leading role in the war for liberation as well as in the formation of the revolutionary national government.40 Moreover, their level of education, their 268

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experience in government as well as in making business transactions in a hostile and rather dangerous environment, had naturally given them better qualifications for entering into and acquiring control over the new state apparatus as compared to the uneducated, less diplomatic military leaders and fighters.41 As a result, a number of Phanariot Greeks,42 such as Demetrios Ypsilantis, John Mavrokordatos, Theodore Negris and Constantine Karatzas succeeded in establishing themselves as the central government’s military and political representatives in Peloponnesos, Western and Eastern Rumeli,43 while leading figures from the islands of Hydra such as George and Lazaros Kountorgiotes occupied prominent positions in the government.44 The inability of the Philike Etaireia (Society of Friends),45 military leaders, primates and Greeks of the diaspora to overcome their internal problems, gain the approval of the nation and head a successful war of liberation against the Ottomans to led to a national disaster. Between 1821 and 1825 civil strife broke out between military and civilian leaders over control of the new state under formation and its political direction. A great number of military leaders lost their lives while others were forced to serve lengthy and humiliating prison terms.46 Although some were to be called back to duty after the successful landing and advance of Egyptian forces in Peloponnesus and Ottoman forces in Rumeli in 1825, they lacked both numbers of Western-trained fighters and technical resources. Since it was the military forces of foreign powers rather than the Greeks themselves which succeeded in liberating the first territories from Ottoman rule, the growth of the political power of civilian over military leaders seemed a natural development. In addition, it inaugurated the bold and continuous involvement of the European states in Greek political life which would last for years to come. The geographically small Greek state was also too militarily and financially weak to support its highly ambitious policy of the liberation of the unredeemed Greeks.47 To realize this, it would be forced to rely on the goodwill of its protecting powers, Great Britain, France and Russia. As for political and military leaders alike, they would compete against each other as to who would better satisfy the wishes of the powerful European states.

Banditry and piracy during the rule of Kapodistrias (1827–1831) With the appointment of Ioannis Kapodistrias, a well-known member of the Greek diaspora, as the first ‘Provisional Governor of [modern] Greece’, the Great Powers and the group of modernists within the Greek community revealed their intention regarding the type of leadership they expected to run the country.48 As for the new Governor, the task of attempting to throw the Ottoman and Egyptian forces out of Greek lands and eliminating the dominant Ottoman features of the social, economic, political and military structures of the liberated lands was not an easy one. His ability to create both a strong, disciplined and loyal national army and an efficient, centralized bureaucracy would be a key factor in the 269

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success of his plans.49 Several irregular bands from the war of independence were still menacing the country and their leaders as well as local primates did not seem happy with the idea of giving up their traditional sources of financial, political and military power for an unfamiliar national government beyond their control. Kapodistrias tried to use all his diplomatic skills to avoid provoking a strong reaction from local primates and powerful military leaders to his initiatives. He felt that if he succeeded in building a strong, disciplined, state-oriented regular army, those local leaders’ influence in military and political circles would be decreased considerably, if not completely eliminated.50 Furthermore, he believed that the success of his administration lay in finding the necessary resources to compensate the majority of irregulars for their services with titles of land and the means to cultivate it. Under such conditions, these undisciplined warriors would become good citizens, respectful of private and state property. Most of all, their dependence on patron–client relationships with local military–civilian leaders would diminish.51 Even though Kapodistrias made no official attempt to disband the existing irregular military forces, he used a variety of indirect methods to incorporate these groups into semi-regular units. Aware of the influence that money had had upon both irregular fighters and their military leaders, he used his position as the ultimate holder and distributor of the state’s financial resources to lure them into joining his plan.52 He created new military formations – Gendarmerie battalions, first the chiliarchies and later the tagmata, which divided the armed men into two camps.53 On the one side, there were the people who followed his plans, entered the battalion formations and appeared willing to accept the training and values of regular European military institutions (discipline, respect for hierarchical order, modern fighting procedures). On the other, there were all those who either felt uncomfortable with the discipline-oriented new military institutions or were left out of them deliberately. For instance, Kapodistrias avoided handing over important command posts to traditionally powerful military leaders such as Varnakioits, Iskos, Rangos, Gouras, Mamouris and Kontogiannis but passed them to refugee fighters from the unliberated lands.54 In other cases, he appointed military chieftains such as Veris, Vlachopoulos, Gardikiotis, Grivas and Pharmakis who were less dangerous to his authority and more manageable.55 Finally, in order to create a new breed of military officers ready to assume leadership positions in the regular army, he established the first Greek Military Academy (Schole Evelpidon) in 1828 and invited French and Bavarian officers to teach the secrets of modern army organization and fighting techniques to the cadets.56 His approach towards the pirates, however, was more direct. Under pressure from both external (foreign powers) and internal (Greek shipowners) forces,57 Kapodistrias made clear his determination to eliminate piracy from Greek territories and to form a strong, unified national naval force. By employing the military services of Captain Andreas Miaoulis, a leading figure in the war against the Ottomans and former pirate, the diplomatic services of Alexander Mavrokordatos, and the legal services of the reformed Sea-Court, the Governor 270

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made certain that his message for the elimination of piracy and the creation of a strong, centralized naval force reached everyone.58 Aware that the majority of seamen turned to piracy due to high unemployment rates and the country’s financial instability, Kapodistrias made an attempt to have them enlist in the newly formed Greek Navy.59 His policy, however, divided former pirates and sailors into two groups: those who had found a position in the government and supported his work and those who either could not or were not willing to leave their old profession and who accordingly joined the political opposition forces. But the desire of Kapodistrias to decrease the political and military power of local primates and traditional military leaders was not without risk. All those who were disappointed with their treatment by the Governor sought ways to overcome their differences and join forces against his rule.60 As the French and British patrons of Greek political parties also became discontented with the policies of Kapodistrias towards them and their clients,61 his political future seemed bleak. In fact, he was killed by two members of a powerful Peloponnesian clan, the Mavromichalis, in October 1831 for showing contempt towards their family.62 With his death, the state fell into complete anarchy as both the national army and the tagmata were disbanded and unpaid armed men joined the irregular groups that were left to plunder at will the agrarian population.63 The evolution of events revealed that the ‘paternalistic and authoritarian style’ of government by Kapodistrias was really a facade for foreign powers and local primates to redirect the organization of the new state.64 As for the military leaders and their followers, they were forced to play a secondary political role by choosing either the road towards legitimization by subordinating themselves to party leaders and foreign powers or the illegal route, becoming the hunted targets of state security and regular army forces. It is also worth noting that whereas a number of women made their presence felt as members of irregular bandit groups, mostly as mothers, daughters or wives of bandit leaders, they appeared to fail in elevating themselves into leadership positions. Certainly it would have been extremely difficult to do this in such a male-dominated mainland society. However, the same does not hold true for the activities of irregular groups in the Aegean Sea, the naval warriors and the pirates. Manto Mavrogenous and Laskarina Bouboulina are two well-known female figures of the Greek war for liberation at sea. They not only dedicated their entire property to the war but also themselves led their own ships and crews into the battlefields. With the creation of the new Greek state, however, the former pirates and naval warriors followed a different path from that of the bandits in the mainland. The majority became an integral part of the growing Greek merchant marine while the rest offered their valuable services to the developing Greek Navy.65

Banditry and piracy during King Otto’s rule (1833–1862) The creation of a strong, highly centralized state machinery that would be loyal to the government (the throne) was also the goal of the Bavarian-born first King 271

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of Greece, Otto I. Aware of the fatal mistakes committed by former Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias and the untamed socio-political power of local primates and military leaders, the new regime decided to trust the leadership positions in the civil bureaucracy, security and military services to the men with whom it felt most comfortable, the Bavarians. As Maurer pointed out, ‘only foreigners can teach civilization in its fullest . . . Just as the Greeks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought Greek wisdom to the rest of Europe, so now Europeans, especially the Germans, must return the light to its homeland from which it has long since vanished . . . The very threatening position of the parties had rendered necessary the presence of a mediating foreign factor.’66 To reach the ultimate goal, that of creating a modern state in the image of those of western Europe, the new regime seemed determined to cut completely the relationship between the state apparatus and the traditional world of klephts, armatoloi and kapoi.67 The beginning of the end for the war of liberation era was in sight. One of the first acts of the new regime was to issue a special decree in March 1833 which ordered all irregular groups to disband and their fighters to return home.68 It followed this with the dissolution of the remnants of the Kapodistrian regular army and the creation of brand new military and security forces around experienced and trusted leading officers.69 The new regular land forces consisted of infantry, cavalry, artillery and engineering units and their personnel were to be trained in secret by Bavarian and French officers.70 To prevent a strong reaction from those military leaders who were excluded from the new arrangement, the throne compensated a number of them with titles of landed property and commemorative medals. Of course, an attempt was made to incorporate about 2,000 irregulars into light infantry units (Akrovolistes).71 But, as the regular pay for the enlisted men was surprisingly low and the organization and functioning of these units followed the same norms of military discipline as those of the regular forces, the majority of irregulars showed no interest.72 The regime did not delay in the reorganization of the armed forces but proceeded with plans for establishing new security forces, the Gendarmerie (Chorofylake), the Royal Phalanx (Vassilike Phalanga) and the National Guard (Ethnofylake). The Gendarmerie, created at the end of May 1833 and based on the rules and functions of its French prototype, had two goals: one was the protection of the people from bandits and robbers who plundered the countryside, the other was to perform the important role of military police.73 The Gendarmerie’s formation and direct attachment to the throne was deemed necessary due to the regime’s distrust of the type of security work performed by local police forces that, by law, functioned under the control of elected local governments. To make service in the Gendarmerie attractive, the regime offered such incentives as increased monthly pay, uniform, retirement benefits and arable land, incentives better than those offered to regular army officers.74 With the establishment of the Royal Phalanx in September 1835, the throne attempted to appease those members of the irregular groups that could become dangerous to the state and the people if left without any type of reward from the government.75 The Phalanx was activated 272

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only in periods of internal disturbance or in war situations and the men serving in its ranks were permitted to wear their traditional uniform ( phoustanella)76 as well as use their own weapons. Souliotes and people from the unliberated lands were quick to join that force, since its function was closer to their world. Finally, the National Guard, which was officially created in October 1843, had as its goal to assist the work of the Gendarmerie at a local level. Armed peasants would be called up occasionally by municipal authorities to assist in the hunting of outlaws.77 The throne viewed the existence of this force as necessary due to its lack of faith in the regular army after the September 1843 revolt. After the establishment of new military and security forces, the regime passed two extremely important laws. The first declared illegal the traditional habit of carrying arms by people who did not belong to either the military or security apparatuses. The second defined the various types of brigandage and set out in detail a suitable punishment for each of them.78 The Bavarians claimed that the intention behind the new legal framework was the containment of lawlessness. However, as the throne, the local primates, the wealthy Greeks of the diaspora and the Great Powers revealed no interest in the economic development of the Greek state,79 opportunities for alternative employment in non-state sectors was either limited or non-existent for the uneducated but rough warriors of the irregular bands. Furthermore, the unwillingness of the regime to implement a much needed land distribution policy left a large number of fighters from freed as well as from unliberated territories landless and thus easy prey for political, military and economic leaders.80 King Otto’s active role in building a sound legal system as well as effective security and military forces in the image of western European states coupled with his indifference towards economic development and land distribution contributed to the development of brigandage. By demanding total submission to the throne, he forced the members of former irregular groups who did not feel comfortable with the Bavarian style of governance to the life of an outlaw. Hence, a large number of former irregular bands were to make their reappearance in the Greek polity as bandits.81 Some of these bandit groups, composed mostly of members coming from the unliberated lands, decided to cross the border and offer their services to local representatives of Ottoman state authority, mostly Albanian dervenagas, in Thessaly, Macedonia and Epiros. As their activity sometimes worked in favour of the Greek irredentist dream, a few of them were able to receive amnesty, return to Greece and be appointed as heads of local security units.82 Others chose to remain inside the geographical borders of the country and continue their traditional life as outlaws. Their wrath because of their treatment by the Bavarian officers and civil bureaucrats of the monarchy were such that in 1835 and 1836 they headed serious social disturbances in Rumeli, forcing the government to offer them some concessions. As Koliopoulos points out, ‘the bands of irregulars . . . were not dissolved after the collapse of the [1835–1836] uprising, but were allowed to exist . . . as an alternative and legitimate refuge for outlaws who might otherwise have taken up outright brigandage again . . . The frontier guards [established in 273

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1838 with the aim] of attracting the war veterans . . . became the corps identified with the traditional military element of continental Greece.’83 In fact, there appears to have been a considerable increase in the irregular groups’ strength in the post-1843 coup period and equally a decrease in that of the regular army. The reasons for this development are various. Certainly, King Otto’s disappointment at the behaviour of his officers and their followers in leading the coup of 1843 and humiliating his regime and his new lack of faith in them diminished his interest in their training and strength.84 As for the realization of his dream to liberate the unredeemed lands, he certainly knew that he could not rely on such a small military force. As the conscription system had raised some opposition, King Otto felt that the people would not react bitterly towards his loss of interest in the regular army. The appointment of the so-called patron of the Rumeliot irregular groups, Ioannis Kolettis, as prime minister from 1844 to 1847 encouraged even further King Otto’s predisposition. As the irregular groups kept alive both the spirit of the revolution and, with their frequent incursions into Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia, the hope of liberating these lands from the Ottoman yoke, the throne seemed to favour their presence and activities outside Greece’s borders. Thus, from the year 1844 on, when the government offered a general amnesty to bandit leaders, there was a considerable movement of outlaws to the region of the country’s northern borders.85 Their direct participation in the uprisings in Epirus and Thessaly, without any coordination of movements and objectives or even a similar logistics system, at a time when the country’s regular army was concerned with internal security issues,86 made these outlaws look like heroes in the eyes of many Greeks or even as ‘the army of the nation’.87 But, when these bandits appeared to forget their irredentist mission and attempted to spread terror in the Greek countryside, the regime did not hesitate to implement all necessary institutional adjustments to reach its goal, that of punishing them severely.88 In addition to banditry, King Otto did not overlook the issue of piracy. By issuing royal decrees, he promised severe punishment (death) to the captain and long prison terms to crew members of those practising piracy in Greek territorial waters. As seamen could now easily find work in either the fast-growing Greek merchant marine or in the Greek Navy, piracy became a rather ‘unhealthy’ profession for them all. With the entrance of steam boats into the picture, even the few remaining romantic pirates were forced to change their profession.89 Whereas King Otto survived the first military revolt against his rule in 1843, he was not so fortunate after the coup of 1862. The involvement of protecting powers, especially the British and the French, in Greece’s social,90 political and military affairs, left no room for him to react without their consent. King Otto left the country on board a British ship, although without abdicating the throne, and was soon replaced by Prince George Glyxbourg from the Danish royal family. Ironically, it was regular army officers in cooperation with other social groups (university students, political leaders) that had staged his fall. The members of irregular bands that his administration had initially tried hard to punish, showed 274

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a greater degree of trust and faith in his rule. If King Otto and his advisors had paid attention to such important issues as land distribution policy and development of the Greek economy, the future of his regime as well as that of members of the irregular bands might have been different. However, by deciding to give the irregular bands a more active military–security role in the country’s northern borders, the throne had contributed to turning them into an important mechanism for the realization of Greek foreign policy objectives.91 Most importantly, the lack of institutional and ideological continuity between the warriors from the war for liberation and the new breed of officers heading the regular army units and the Gendarmerie, forced the members of irregular bands to choose between submission to the new rulers or the life of an outlaw.92 Only temporarily would irregular bands be permitted to operate with the consent of the civilian government in specific geographical areas.

The role of irregular groups from 1863 to the early twentieth century The year-long socio-political upheaval, caused by the forced exodus of King Otto in 1862 and lasting to the arrival of his replacement, King George I, in 1863, served as a breeding ground for brigandage. Large bands, formed around prisoners who were set free during the troubled interregnum, crossed the country unhindered by the security forces and terrorized the defenceless peasants.93 Only this time, the brigands would not limit their activities to peasants but would make attempts to accomplish feats that would increase the respect and fear of both friends and enemies. Hence, in November 1865, three British citizens were captured while in the prefecture of Acarnania where they had gone to hunt deer. In August 1866, the Deputy Sotiris Sotiropoulos was captured on his estate in Triphyllia and only freed after paying a ransom. But in April 1870, a number of well-connected British people visiting Marathon were captured by outlaws and murdered when their captors attempt to escape Gendarmerie units. These notorious murders shocked western European circles and increased their criticism of the government and the people for the country’s state of lawlessness.94 Subsequent attempts to reduce brigandage through the carrot and stick approach brought only limited results as the regime continued to be indifferent to processes that might improve the country’s undeveloped economy.95 The close relation between members of the political world and the irregular groups was obviously hindering the elimination of brigandage.96 Hence, a number of people began to point out that the country did not need additional irregular groups to capture these outlaws but a strong, disciplined and efficient regular army.97 The conservative approach of King George to both internal and external issues kept the manpower of the military to the level of King Otto’s time, that of 8,000 men. But the formation of modern regular armies by Balkan states expecting to take the lion’s share after the anticipated breakdown of Ottoman rule in its European lands, alerted the Greek government and royal family to the need for military reform. 275

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Charilaos Trikoupis tried to modernize the military institution by increasing the number of cadets entering the Military Academy, inviting a French military mission to supervise the reorganization of military education, sending a large number of officers abroad to learn the secrets of military warfare at their source, and by purchasing new weapons and equipment for both the army and the navy.98 Although his policies did not bring immediate gains as the Greek army was heavily defeated by the Ottomans in the 1897 war, nonetheless his initiative to reform the military institution gave birth to a new class of professional officers.99 As the military institution went through a process of radical transformation, the irregular groups were forced to follow or meet the consequences of their failure. If they were formed around a deserting military officer and fought for the liberation of unredeemed Greeks, their legitimacy was not questioned. In contrast, both the people and the government looked on them as national heroes.100 The rest were viewed as simple criminals and the security apparatus was ordered to carry out their punishment.

Epilogue In a trial of those charged with collaborating with a group of bandits under the leadership of Arvanitakis, an army officer pointed out that ‘there can be no brigand without a shepherd, and no shepherd without a brigand . . . A band of peasant brigands is easy to destroy. In contrast, a band of migratory shepherd brigands is impossible to destroy, because it is connected with migratory shepherds. They are all kinsmen and a social class of their own . . . When one of them has two sons, one turns brigand and the other becomes a shepherd, so that one should support the other . . . They have no fatherland: for them, fatherland is wherever they go. In Macedonia they become Macedonians, in Thebes they are Thebans, in the Peloponnesus they are Peloponnesians; they are cosmopolitans.’101 A natural product of the insecurity of life and property as well as of arbitrary rule by representatives of either state or local government in the geo-political area in which they were brought up, these men learned that family bonds and their skills in the use or threat of arms were their only sources of livelihood. The inability and unwillingness of the Greeks of the diaspora, the local primates, the wealthy shipowners and the church to start the war for liberation against the Ottomans transformed the groups of former land and sea outlaws into the backbone of the entire liberation movement. However, their lack of unity and cohesion as well as of education and administrative experience forced them to accept a secondary political role behind the Western-oriented, educated men of the diaspora who occupied key positions in the newly formed government. Although the political power of armed men increased considerably during the war, their internal divisions and subsequent civil strife caused serious damage to their status as a military class in the state-to-be. In fact, since the creation of modern Greece had been made possible by the direct intervention of the Great Powers, the men who had really fought the Ottomans would have to ask the government, first Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias and later on King Otto, for a place in the sun (i.e. employment by the state). 276

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Since old habits die hard, irregular groups of armed men would not disappear so easily. In fact, the Greek state continued to ask for their services on the country’s borders with the Ottoman Empire. The small, ill-equipped and ill-trained regular Greek army had no chance against the powerful Ottoman forces. But the irregular bands and their military skills of guerrilla warfare were extremely useful in keeping the dream of liberation alive inside the Greek community that was still under Ottoman rule.102 Thus, the state and its military–civilian representatives appeared willing to tolerate the behaviour of the irregular groups inside the Greek borders. Only when the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans appeared imminent and the need to construct a powerful, modern regular army became urgent, did the Greek state put an end to its support of the bandits. It started by painting a dark picture of all of them both in the local and the state media, presenting their activities as identical to that of common criminals. The holders of power apparently succeeded in eliminating the pirates and the majority of bandits and irregular bands, but they failed to erase people’s admiration for the latter’s physical accomplishments or respect for their invaluable contribution to the formation of modern Greece which continued to be expressed through popular songs and novels.

Notes 1 H. Zehr, Crime and Development of Modern Society (London, 1976), pp. 143–4. 2 K. Karpat, An Inquiry Into the Social Foundations of Nationalism in the Ottoman State: From Social Estates to Classes, From Millets to Nations (Princeton University, Research Monograph No. 39, 1973) and R. Clogg, ‘The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York, 1982), Vol. 2. 3 G. Arnakes, ‘The Greek Church of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 24 (1952); Th. Papadopoulos, Studies and Documents Relating to the History of the Greek Church and People under Turkish Domination (Brussels, 1952) and P. Konortas, Othomanikes Theoriseis gia to Oikoumeniko Patriarcheio, 17–20 aionas [Ottoman Views on the Institution of Ecumenical Patriarch] (Athens, 1998). 4 In 1789, the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V published a document called Didaskalia Patriki (Paternal Teaching). In it, the Greek Orthodox community was warned not to fall for the Western trap called in the political world a ‘system of liberty’ because it contradicts the Scriptures and leads the people away from Christian virtues. A few years later, in 1807, the same Patriarch would lead a group of 1,000 Greek workers to help the Ottoman authorities construct fortifications against Western invaders and pray for the lengthy life of the Sultan. P. Sherrard, ‘Church, State and the Greek War of Independence’, in R. Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence (London, 1973), p. 182. 5 Anonymous, Ellenike Nomarchia [Athens, 1957] p. 155, cited in Clogg, ‘The Greek Mercantile Bourgeoisie: “Progressive” or “Reactionary” ’, in his (ed.) Balkan Society in the Age of Greek Independence (London, 1981). 6 H. Inalcik, ‘Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700’, Archivum Ottomanicum, Vol. 6 (1980); K. Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, 1994). 7 J. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause (Oxford, 1987), p. 26. 8 Ibid., p. 31, ft. 18. G. Vlachogiannes, Klephtes tou Moria [Bandits of Peloponnesos] (Athens, 1935).

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9 Ibid., p. 31. 10 R. Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 27. 11 The entrance or exit from a klephtic band was not limited or restricted. T. Vournas, Armatoloi kai Klephtes (Athens, 1958). 12 Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, p. 32. 13 W. McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago, 1982), p. 16. 14 J. Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece (Princeton, 1968), p. 32. 15 They coerced peasants into cultivating their land, demanded fees for the return of stolen animals or for mediating in disputes and levied tolls for crossing safely various mountain passages. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, pp. 30–1. 16 Such well-known hereditary families were the Botsaris and Tzavelas in Souli, the Varnakiotis, Iskos, Rangos, Kontogiannis, Grivas and Papakostas in western Rumeli and Kriezotis, Mavrovouniotis, Gouras and Mamoures in eastern Rumeli. 17 Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 34. See also, N. Kotarides, Paradosiake Epanastase kai Eikosiena [Traditional Revolution and 1821] (Athens, 1993), pp. 227–40 18 Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, pp. 33–4. D. Skiotis, ‘From Bandit to Pasha: First steps in the rise to power of Ali of Tepelen, 1750–1784’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, (1971) p. 232. 19 Examples include the rise and fall of Katsantonis and Nikotsaras. G. Finley, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1971), Vol. 1, pp. 20–4. 20 Such examples are: (a) the Theodoros Grivas’s band in Vonitsa formed around his brothers (Floros, Stavros and Alexis) and close friends and relatives, (b) the leading armed bands of Souliotes, the Tzavelas and Botsaris, which were built around close and distant relatives of each family and whose membership was restricted only to Souliot’s kin, (c) the Theodoros Kolokotronis’s band in Peloponessos and the Mavromichalis’s band in Mane were formed around sons, sons-in-law and close relatives. In fact, the majority of armed groups were formed and functioned along these lines. N. Kasomoulis, Enthymemata Stratiotika tes Epanastaseos ton Ellenon, 1821–1832 [Military Reminiscences from the Greek Revolution, 1821–1832] (Athens, 1939–1942) edited by G. Vlachogiannis, pp. 28–9, 188–9, 394–5]. As Petropulos points out, ‘ “Family” was not synonymous with “household”.’ ‘Family denoted many households, extending even to those of distant cousins, bound together by ties of blood . . . Kinship and material interests bound as many as a hundred individuals or more into an extensive group which regarded itself a family . . . [Through] institutionalized ties . . . marriage, adoption, koumparia and fraternal friendship . . . the family expanded considerably.’ Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 57. 21 An example is the observation of the Briton, Leicester Stanhope, of Captain Stornaris’s relationship with his armed men. ‘[Stornaris] possesses about one hundred and twenty villages, and each of these contains, upon an average, about seventy families . . . The inferior Capitani, under Stornaris, each receive the dues of three or four families, and each command a certain number of men. The regular soldiers under Stornaris amount 400 . . . they are paid only during three months a year . . . they live well and eat twice a day bread and meat . . . They are subjected to no military discipline or punishment, and can quit their chief at pleasure.’ Quoted from Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 55. 22 An acute observer of modern Greece in the 1830s, the Bavarian scholar Friedrich Thiersch points out that ‘as there was no central authority, capable of controlling and defending the inhabitants, each was forced to look elsewhere for support and protection. The most natural and surest support was found in the family, whose members and even

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23 24

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32

relatives . . . [were] ready to aid each other . . . In the second place, the isolated man had to take his position in the midst of others. According, as he felt himself weak or strong, he made himself the partisan of some influential man or collected partisans about himself. In this manner, each distinguished man has a more or less considerable number of subordinate persons who associate with him, listen to him, ask his advice, execute his wishes and defend his interests, always careful to merit his respect and win his confidence.’ Quoted from Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 54. Finlay, ‘Brigandage in Greece’, Saturday Review, 6 May 1871 and Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, pp. 30–1. As Kontogeorgis argues, for the simple peasant it is not of great importance whether the goal of the struggle of these armed groups is for freedom only for their own members or as part of a greater scheme that included other socio-political groups as well. In the struggles of the klephts and armatoloi, the people identified with them due to their deep hatred for the timar owners, the primates and the Turkish or Albanian tyrants. They also admired the heroic stance of the klepht against the powerful social, religious and political mechanisms of the Ottoman status quo. G. Kontogeorgis, ‘Oi Elladikes Koinonikes kai Politikes Dynameis sten Ystere Tourkokratia’ [The Greek Social and Political Forces in Late Turkish Rule], in G. Kontogeorgis (ed.), Koinonikes kai Politikes Dynameis Sten Ellada [Social and Political Forces in Greece] (Athens, 1977), p. 31. According to a famous song all klepht declare that ‘Ego ragias den ginomai/ Tourkous na proskynao/ Den proskynao tous archondes kai tous kotsambasedes’ (I refuse to become a rea’ya[subject]/I refuse to accept the rule of the Turks/ I will not obey to the law of the primates and the political leaders). A. Politis, Demotika Tragoudia [Popular Ballads] (Athens, 1991) Second Edition, p. 85; G. Tsoustas, Apanthisma Heroicon Poiimaton [Selection of Heroic Poems] (Athens, 1893). St. Damianakos, Ethos kai Politismos ton Epikindynon Taxeon sten Ellada [Ethos and Civilization of the Dangerous Classes in Greece] (Athens, 2005), pp. 40–1. V. Sfyroeras, The Greek Crews of the Ottoman Navy (Athens, 1968). A. Krantonelli, Greek Piracy and Corsair (Athens: Estia, 1998), pp. 27–32 and D. Zakynthinos, ‘Corsaires et pirates dans la mers greques au temps de la domination turque’, L’Hellenisme Contemporain, Avril-Mai 1939, Paris, pp. 695–738. K. Kome, ‘Oi Maniates Peirates’ [The Maniates Pirates] in Kathemerine (Epta Emeres), 16 February 1997, pp. 20–1. V. Sfyrorea, ‘Ta ‘koursarika tou Katsoni’ [The Corsair Boats of Katsonis] in Kathemerine (Epte Emeres), 16 February 1997, pp. 10–1 and E. Yannakopoulou, ‘Quelques repaires de pirates en Grèce de l’Ouest, lieux de commerce illégal du XVIè,e siècle’, Actes du Iie Colloque International d’Histoire: Economies méditerranèenne, Equilibres et Inter-communications (Athens, 1985). S. Howe, An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution (New York: 1828), p. 34. J. C. Alexander, Brigandage and Public Order in the Morea, 1685–1806 (Athens, 1985). For example, George Karaiskakis considered Agrapha, an area he claimed to have liberated, as his own land and came into direct conflict with Giannakis Rangos, the man whom the civilian government had appointed as military governor of that area. Similar disputes broke out between Alexi Vlachopoulos and Ioanni Staiko over the area of Vlochos, Kosta Siadema and Christo Makri over the area of Apokouro, George Valtino and Demo Skaltsa over the district of Lidoriki and so forth. As Petropulos points out, given that the idea of a nation had only then started to penetrate the minds of military leaders, ‘their main political objective was simply that of expanding the boundaries of their captanliks and consolidating their own power within them.’ Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 33.

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33 M. Heper, ‘Center and Periphery in the Ottoman Empire, with Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century’, International Political Science Review, Vol. 1, (1980) and S. Mardin, ‘Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 12, (1969). 34 As Nassau W. Senior observes, ‘in Greece all power is considered a source of profit.’ Petropulos also argues that ‘when the success of the Revolution made the state an object of contention among Greeks . . . a specific post [in the state apparatus became] a source of private profit to its holder rather than an instrument of public benefit to all.’ Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 60. 35 As Diamandouros points out, in the minds of military leaders any attempt through state documents to take away from their control the political, military and financial supervision of a specific area was considered either as an act of conspiracy by their rivals or as a cheap joke. In their world view, a ‘neutral’ state mechanism was impossible. P. N. Diamandouros, Oi Aparches tes Sygrotises Synchronou Kratous sten Ellada, 1821–1828 [The Beginning of the Formation Process of a Modern State in Greece, 1821–1828] (Athens, 2002), pp. 96–7. 36 Thus, Stornaris and Likatas tried to settle old accounts with Iskos; Notis Botsaris with Bakolas, Tsongas with Staikos, Rangos with Karaiskakis, Plapouta with Deligianne, Kolokotronis with Zaime and Londo. For additional examples, D. Dontas, The Last Phase of the War of Independence in Western Greece (Thessaloniki, 1966), pp. 54–6. 37 Two famous klepht who attempted to revolt against the Ottoman government without expecting any type of assistance from foreign powers, Dionysios Skylosophos in Epirus in 1611 and Ephthymios Vlakhavas in Thessaly in 1808, failed to see their fellow military leaders joining in. In fact, they were left alone and were in the end severely punished by the Ottoman authorities for their actions. 38 ‘Money is power,’ argued the American philhellene George Jarvis who made an attempt to play the role of the captain in revolutionary Greece but with limited success due to limited financial resources. ‘Without it, [even] the greatest man is not considered [of any value] here.’ Quoted from Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, p. 60. 39 On the role of Philehelenes see W. S. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (London, 1972) and D. Dakin, British and American Philhellenes during the War of Greek Independence (Thessaloniki, 1955). On the role of foreign powers, see C. W. Crawley, The Question of Greek Independence: A Study of British Policy in the Near East, 1821–1833 (Cambridge, 1930) and A. vo ProkeschOsten, Geschichte des Abfalls der Griechen vom Turkischen Reiche im Jahre 1821 und der Grundung des Hellenischen Konigreiches aus diplomatischen Standpunkte (Graz, 1970). 40 Diamandouros, Oi Aparches tes Sygrotises Synchronou Kratous sten Ellada, pp. 121–47; T. Stamatopoulos, O Esoterikos Agonas kata ten Epanastase tou 1821 [The Internal Struggle During the Revolution of 1821] (Athens, 1971) Vol. A, p. 202. 41 Kontogiorgis, ‘Oi Elladikes Koinonikes kai Politikes Dynameis sten Ystere Tourkokratia’, p. 37. 42 C. Mango, ‘The Phanariots and the Byzantine Tradition’ in Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence. 43 Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, pp. 77–82. 44 Diamandouros, Oi Aparches tes Sygrotises Synchronou Kratous sten Ellada, pp. 98–101; G. Finley, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1971), pp. 170–1. 45 G. D. Frangos, ‘The Philiki Etairia: A Premature National Coalition’ in Clogg (ed.), 1973, The Struggle for Greek Independence, p. 142. 46 Among those who served lengthy prison sentence was the Chief of Peloponnesian Forces, Theodoros Kolokotrones. 47 At the time of its liberation, the borders of the Greek state extended from Peloponnesos to Central Greece. Some coastal islands, Hydra, Spetses and Cyclades were also included in the new state.

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48 On the ideological and practical differences between the modernists and the traditionalists in Greek society and politics before, during and after the formation of the Greek state, See Diamandouros, Oi Aparches tes Sygrotises Synchronou Kratous sten Ellada, pp. 108–47. 49 St Papageorgiou, E Stratiotike Politike tou Kapodistria [The Military Policy of Kapodistrias] (Athens, 1986), p. 38. 50 St Papadopoulos, ‘E Organosis tou Stratou sten Dytike Roumeli kata ten Epoche tou Kapodistria’ [The military organization in western Rumeli during the period of Kapodistria] Ellenika, Vol. 8, (1964). 51 Th Veremis, Kapodistrias and the French: The Formation of a Regular Greek Army (Athens, 1982), p. 16. 52 Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, p. 67. 53 For a lengthy account on the formation, organization and function of Chiliarchies and Tagmata, Papageorgiou, E Stratiotike Politike tou Kapodistria, pp. 49–175. 54 The Souliotes and fighters from the unredeemed lands of Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia and the islands were in greater need of funds than the rest. State funds appeared extremely attractive to their leaders. Papageorgiou, E Stratiotike Politike tou Kapodistria, pp. 16–17. 55 Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, pp. 59–161. 56 Papageorgiou, E Stratiotike Politike tou Kapodistria, pp. 179–95. 57 D. Themele-Katephore, The Struggle Against Piracy and the Sea Court during the first Kapodistrian era, 1828–1829 (Athens, 1973), pp. 43–53. 58 Ibid., pp. 67–82. 59 Ibid., pp. 83–9. 60 Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, pp.120–4; Papageorgiou, E Stratiotike Politike tou Kapodistria, pp. 166–74. 61 Veremis, Kapodistrias and the French, pp. 17; Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 127. 62 B. Kremmydas, ‘H Dolofonia tou Kapodistria’ [The assassination of Kapodistria], Eranistes (1977), pp. 245–50, 262–70. 63 As the Bavarian scholar Georg Ludvig von Maurer pointed out in 1835 ‘plundered fields and villages transformed into heaps of ruins are to this moment the eloquent testimony of the achievement of those days [the anarchy of 1832]’. G. L. Maurer, O Ellenikos Laos [The Greek Nation] (Athens,1976), p. 148 [O. Rombake (trans.)]. 64 Clogg, (1986) A Short History of Modern Greece, p. 67. Although a number of Greek and foreign scholars have painted with dark colours Kapodistrias’ authoritarian attitude, they have overlooked the fact that even one of his assassins-to-be, Petrobeys Mavromichalis, had warned Bishop Ignatios in October of 1827 that if Kapodistrias did not bring with him at least 6,000 loyal armed men, his prestige in the eyes of the people would diminish in a few months and he might lose his own life. Diavazo [Reading], Vol. 275, (1991), p. 58. 65 M. C. Hatzeioannou, ‘Oi Emporokapetanaioi Meta ten Epanastase: Merikes Paratereseis’ [The Merchant Marine Captains after the Revolution: Some Observations] in E Epanastase tou 1821: Meletes ste Mneme tew Despoinas ThemeliKatephore [The Revolution of 1821: Studies in Memory of Depoina Themeli-Katephore] (Athens, 1994), pp. 157–64. 66 Maurer, O Ellenikos Laos, p. 162. As Strong points out, the new regime brought with it to Greece 5,500 men recruited from German states. Fr Strong, Greece as a Kingdom (London, 1842), pp. 280–1. 67 Although the process of disbanding the irregular groups has been seen by some scholars as an unjust state measure towards the war of liberation veterans, it must be pointed out that the majority of these men did not have a legitimate claim to such an identity. As Koliopoulos argues, “only a fraction of the irregulars in liberated Greece were at this time real war veterans, the rest being armed men of every possible description who

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68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81

82 83 84

85

86

joined the bands after the war . . . certificates of war service were never more easy to acquire, as captains, wishing to increase and strengthen their military clienteles, were always obliging to old or new clients”. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, pp. 76–7. Government Gazette, 8 March 1833. ‘The regency’, Petropulos claims, ‘wanted the royal government militarily strong, strong enough to withstand the demands or to punish the abuses of any party. For absolute loyalty, non-Greek troops, free from rival local and party allegiances, were considered a better bet than the Greeks.’ Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 166. Maurer claims that in a few months the regular infantry, artillery and cavalry units learned how to fight and conduct themselves as well the forces that had been recruited in Bavaria for the Greek government in 1833. Maurer, O Ellenikos Laos, p. 563. Whereas Petropulos argues that the number of irregulars in the early 1830s was 5,000 men, Finlay argues that their number was close to 13,000. However, they both agree on the number of men enlisted to serve in the unit of Akrovolistes. Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, pp. 167–8. Government Gazette, 3 June 1833. Maurer, O Ellenikos Laos, p. 573. Government Gazette, 18 September 1835 and 11 October 1835. A traditional dress of Greek warriors similar to the Scottish Kilt. Government Gazette, 16 October 1843. The irregular groups were divided into brigands (listes), guerrillas (antartes), brigand-guerrillas (listantartes), brigand-armatoloi (listarmatoloi), brigand-captains (listokapetanioi) and Turkish captains (Tourkokapetanioi). I. Koliopoulos, ‘Listes kai Listantartes sten kentrike Ellada to 1835–1836’ [Brigands and brigand-guerrillas in Central Greece from 1835–1836], Mnemon, Vol. 7, (1979). J. Levandis, The Greek Foreign Debt and the Great Powers, 1821–1898 (New York, 1944). On the socio-political effect of the land issue in Greece, See W. McGrew, ‘The Greek “National Estates” ’: Disposition of Former Turkish Properties during the War of Independence”, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1971. Captain Roupakias, a well-known and popular brigand, in his letter to a Turkish commander explains that he and his men do not see themselves as either ‘brigands’ or ‘rebels’. They were simply trying to earn their ‘day’s bread’. General State Archives (Greece), F160. The cases of Korkontzelos, Voulgaris, Velentzas and Giatagganas serve as examples. Koliopoulos, Brigands with a Cause, pp. 102–3. Although the aim of the military officers who led the coup d’etat was to limit King Otto’s political power through a Constitution, one of the hidden goals was to take away from his control the military and security forces. Soon after the September 1843 coup, the cadets showed signs of lack of discipline and their instructors became indifferent to the Academy’s progress or simply interested in accommodating the demands of their extended family members and relatives. E. Stasinopoulos, E Istoria tes Scholes Evekpidon [History of the Greek Military Academy] (Athens, 1954), p. 72. On the issue of amnesty, See Government Gazette throughout the year 1844. On the movement of outlaws to the northern borders and Kolettis’ behaviour, See G. Aspreas, Politike Istoria tew Neoteras Ellados, 1821–1928 [Political Hisrory of Modern Greece, 1821–1928] (Athens, 1930), pp. 207–8. Koliopoulos argues that Alexandros Rangavis, the Greek foreign minister, wrote in 1856 that ‘the Greek army had never been, nor was meant to be, anything but an internal peace-keeping force, as Greece’s national boundaries and independence were guaranteed by the Protecting powers’. A few years later, in 1868, Deligiorgis ‘stated in [the Greek] Parliament that the army’s duties were limited to internal security and tax collection’. Koliopoulos, (1987), Brigands with a Cause, p. 296.

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87 Ibid., pp. 135–55. 88 For instance, at the end of 1858 only a few outlaws, no more than fifty, existed in the entire Rumeli. Famous brigand-chiefs such as Davelis, Zapheiris, Drelas, Beloulias, Kainourios and Chortarias were killed in action whereas a score of other well-known chiefs were arrested. General State Archives, F154. 89 K. Papathanasopoulos, Ellenike Emporike Naftilia, 1833–1856 [Greek Merchantile Marine] (Athens, 2001), pp. 49–93. 90 The landing of British and French armed forces at the port of Piraeus and the blockade of all major ports by the British in 1854 due to their dissatisfaction with the close relations which had developed between King Otto I and the Tsar was a ‘natural’ outcome of the patron-client relationship between the Great Powers and the country. When the garrison of Athens revolted against King Otto, the latter asked the advice of the ambassadors of the Protecting Powers, did not attempt to suppress the revolt but left the country without abdicating his throne. 91 J. Koliopoulos, ‘Brigandage and Irredentism in Nineteenth-Century Greece’, in M. Blinkhorn and Th Veremis (eds), Modern Greece: Nationalism and Nationality (Athens, 1990), pp. 79–81. 92 Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, p. 171 and K. TsichliAroni, Agrotikes Exegerseis sten Palaia Ellada, 1833–1881 [Peasantry Uprisings in Old Greece] (Athens, 1989), p. 271. 93 E. Deligiorges, Rapport au roi sur la surete publique (Athens, 1870), pp. 12–13. 94 R. Jenkins, The Dilesi Murders (London, 1961). 95 Government Gazette, 5 March 1871. 96 As Clogg argues, ‘in the course of a trial of a deputy from Thessaly in 1894, it emerged that the spoils of a band of Thessalian brigands had been divided three ways, with one share for the brigands, one for the church and one for the local deputy and his two brothers.’ R. Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece, p. 85. On the close relations and mutual interests between chiefs of bandit groups and politicians and landowners, See Ch. Tuckerman, The Greeks of To-day (London, 1872), pp. 235–7. 97 A deputy described the appointment of volunteer irregular groups employed by the government as frontier guards as ‘wolves’ called to protect people from the other ‘wolves’. Quoted from Koliopoulos (1987), Brigands with a Cause, p. 181. 98 Th Veremis, Oi Epemvaseis tou Stratou sten Ellenike Politike, 1916–1936 [Military Interventions in Greek Politics, 1916–1936] (Athens: Odysseas, 1983), p. 16. 99 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 100 The case of Pavlos Melas’s group and their activities in Macedonia during the early twentieth century constitutes such an example. N.P. Mela, Pavlos Melas (Athens, 1964). 101 Quoted from Koliopoulos (1987), Brigands with a Cause, p. 291. 102 A. Batalas, ‘Send a Thief to Catch a Thief: State Building and the Employment of Irregular Military Formations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Greece’ in D. Davis and A. Pereira (eds) Irregular armed forces and their role in politics and sate formation (Cambridge, 2003) pp. 164–7.

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12 SEIZING THE INITIATIVE, REGAINING A VOICE The Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada as a struggle of the marginalized Roger Heacock

Introduction Karl Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, notes that previous materialist thinkers had left out one essential socially explanatory element, the specific human subject. This critique applies to many historical and political writings. The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) took the critique to heart, and attempted to write a different kind of history, whose most important characteristic is a “shift in perspective,” whereby “the agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern’.”1 Who is meant by the subaltern may change in place and time, but Edward Said is right to specify the centrality of the urban poor and the peasants (and there is no longer the reification of a specific organized social class such as the “proletariat”),2 whose particular modes of resistance (referring to the Indian case, but, by implication, more generally) provide the key to understanding large-scale, prolonged social upheavals, particularly in the third world. This approach certainly represents an “epistemological break,” to use the expression of Louis Althusser, one of the oft-cited models of the SSG, as compared with previous thinking about revolutions. Frantz Fanon, for example, while fearing a possible degeneration of the postcolonial state, had contrasted colonial society, divided and inchoate, with the allegedly united postliberation national society. As noted by Alexis Wick, [w]hat is particularly hegemonic (and problematic) in the discourse of anticipatory nationalism, is the categorical adoption of the national framework (defined in terms taken from European history) as the supreme political entity of modernity and progress. To quote the nonchalant terms of Fanon himself: ‘national culture is the most elaborated form of culture.’This position, it should be added, came as a reaction to the racist 284

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theses of Eurocentric humanism, but it is significant [to note] that Fanon in no way questions the frame of reference of his political philosophy (which is, once again, of European inspiration). So it is that Fanon, abandoning his usual critical spirit, takes the existence of the Algerian nation as a point of departure, which ‘logically’ implies its right to self-determination. He contrasts the divided colonial situation with a ‘homogeneous’ national society. He postulates an essentialist vision of the Algerian nation whose homogeneity is anchored in the Arabic language. We know today, after so many miseries (notably in Kabylia), that that position was false: worse, it was oppressive.3 Fanon, like many others before and after him, was confusing the ideology of a state with the identity of its citizens. Whereas, in other words, the national ideology may in its discourse be unitary, in every case the identity of its citizens is mixed, shifting over time, hybrid, multilayered, and conflictual. The critique addressed by the SSG to Indian historiography in particular certainly applies just as much and perhaps more to the Palestinian case. This is because we are dealing with the phenomenon of European colonial and Zionist histories at the same time. Traditional European colonialism already favors a focalization on institutional and discursive elements of the interaction between colonizer and colonized, and therefore on its two protagonists. Both of these are the elements that Western and Western-trained historians, in their frequent ignorance of the host society, can best comprehend: in considering the dyad of colonizer–colonized, there is no strong impulse to look into the depth of either one singly. As for the history of Zionism, it is by definition premised on the power of certain founding myths, such as the integral national dream of the Jewish people and, with regard to the Palestinians, the idea of the people without a land for a land without people. In both cases, the mission is to people or to civilize a blank and therefore uniform space (geographically and socially speaking). The reaction of the spokespeople of the colonized Palestinians has been equally uniform, and so Palestinian historiography at first tried, in the face of denial by the colonizer, to prove the existence of a Palestinian people as a historic, unitary entity, one, moreover, which, since the 1960s at least, is guided by an institutionalized and cohesive elite. This approach may well be understood as a reaction to the absurd claim of the colonizers, but it has, as a result, failed simply to take the Palestinian people as a point of departure if not a given, and more closely to analyze its internal and external conflicts, notably class-based ones. The result is to give the “other side” an epistemological lead, thus reinforcing what is the very essence of colonialism. But rather than insisting on the need for a new epistemology of the Palestinian question as I have done elsewhere,4 I will try in these pages to illustrate the importance of the social dimension in general, and the pressure of the poor and marginalized classes in particular, in modern and contemporary Palestinian history, notably during the period of the al-Aqsa intifada which broke out in September, 2000. 285

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Palestinian contemporary history: a working model Of particular relevance to the present analysis is the way in which Partha Chatterjee shows that in India, a reevaluation of previous historical works and methods occurred in the 1970s, when liberal and Marxist orthodoxies regarding Indian history were questioned, and a new approach adopted. “It was all very well, these critics argued, to pick out the many undoubtedly modern elements in the thought of the nineteenth-century social reformers and ideologues, but what significance do these elements of modernity acquire when looked at in the context of the evolving colonial economy of the same period, of massive deindustrialization and destitution, of unbearable pressures on the land leading to a virtually irreversible process of regressive rent-exploitation and stagnation in levels of productivity, of the crushing of peasant resistance, of the growing social gulf rather than bonds of alliance between a modernized, Western-educated, urban elite, and the rest of the nation? In what sense can this modernity be reconciled with any meaningful conception of the national-popular?”5 In attempting to find a way to break with these orthodoxies, Chatterjee designs a model of colonial and postcolonial nationalism which it is useful for us to understand here. For him, there is in the history of nationalism of colonial formations, the moment of departure, which produces awareness of the superiority of the West, along with the idea that one should combine the material superiority of the West with the moral advantages of the eastern or indigenous culture. This is when some indigenous people begin to seek ways out of their subjection, by massively adopting colonially inspired strategies against the colonizer. These are by definition the exclusive purview of the Western-trained elite. Then comes the moment of maneuver, in which the historical consolidation of the national movement is secured in the colony through decrying the modern even as a protracted struggle has gotten underway. The moment of arrival occurs when nationalist thought has attained its fullest development, through a discourse of order, of the rational organization of power, at a time when the indigenous elites have successfully taken over the state apparatus.6 The Subaltern Studies Group’s mission was to probe beyond that third moment. In the case of Palestine, these “moments” can be made to fit, but somewhat awkwardly, because the type of colonization to which it was subjected was a dual one, including the classic, European form, for the brief period 1918–1948 and, simultaneously, Zionist settler colonization which was aimed at disempowering the local population and replacing it to a great extent. Since the Palestinians did not have the demographic and technological tools with which to fight off both brands of colonialism, and certainly not both of them simultaneously, the period of struggle has been both a much longer and a somewhat more convoluted one. In particular, the relationship between Palestinian elites and masses was and is always being blurred because of the precariousness of the social formation, always threatened with obliteration. It is not as easy, therefore, to set the Westernized elites and the locally nourished movement in as stark a contrast to

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one another. For this reason, one can usefully take into account the successive phases proposed by Joseph Massad,7 in his attempt to adapt Chatterjee (and indirectly, Gramsci) to the Jordanian historical case. Massad proposes four stages in the development of the nation. They are: (1) the “colonial moment,” “when colonialism establishes a state-framework on a colonized territory/country . . . ;” (2) “the anticolonial moment,” when struggle is generalized; (3) the “expansion and contraction of the nation,” when the now-independent territory is amended in one sense or another, by winning or losing new territories; and (4) the moment of internal implosion “generally characterized by civil war or revolution.” This brings us closer to the Palestinian case, but there is a vital missing phase, during which the colonial masters are challenged and before they have been replaced. In Palestine this is still going on, whereas in Jordan it hardly occurred, since the British were replaced when Glubb Pasha was dismissed by the king. Until the year 2000, Palestine was going through a combination of Chatterjee’s moments 2 and 3 on the one hand, and what one could call moment 1a in Massad, the protracted but unsuccessful attempt to wrest control, and also moment 2, with the creation of the PLO and Fateh, among other resistance organizations, and 3, as Palestine’s geographic and demographic shape contracted with the acceptance of two states in the 1970s and the Declaration of independence in Algiers in November, 1988. Since September, 2000, it has been a continuation of Massad’s moment 3, with the reoccupation by Israel of previously “autonomous” parts of Palestine, and moment 4, the implosion. This implosion has been as significant as it has been confidential, pitting the domesticated leadership and its middle and lower middle class supporters against the broad masses of the people in the camps and villages. Chatterjee and Massad together provide a key to the paradigmatic nature of contemporary Palestinian history. The struggle between the elites and the masses, between anti-colonial strategies, and indeed, between Palestinian political groups, coincides to a great extent with a struggle between the last two moments of maneuver and arrival. The PLO, having become the proto-state, has reached the moment of arrival, or tried very hard to argue that that moment had been reached, during the Oslo period and, much less convincingly, after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada, especially in 2003, with the nomination of new “governments,” the appointment of successive “prime ministers,” the declaration of “states of emergency,” and so on. One can likewise compare the situation in Palestine with the Indian case, where according to Chatterjee, the moment of arrival had some rather familiar characteristics. And so the split between two domains of politics – one, a politics of the elite, and the other, a politics of the subaltern classes – was replicated in the sphere of mature nationalist thought by an explicit recognition of the split between a domain of rationality and a domain of unreason, a domain of science and a domain of faith, a domain of organization and a domain of spontaneity. But it was a rational understanding which, by the very act of its recognition of the Other, also effaced the Other.8

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Historical background The Palestinian social pyramid was rapidly transformed in the twentieth century, as a direct result of the conflict against the British, then the Zionists. Here is not the place to undertake a social history of the Palestinian people but one must begin at least with the 1936–1939 revolt against British rule, because it resulted in the decimation of thousands of peasant activists, the backbone of the uprising. It also discredited the existing landowning and coastal city elites and began undermining their legitimacy.9 This process came to a conclusion in the 1947–1949 period, when during the Nakba and as its direct result, the restructuring of the society got underway through the expulsion from their homes in the newly created State of Israel of three-quarters of a million people. Preparation for a protracted struggle began immediately around the new mass base of the social formation that rapidly emerged, and that has, despite shifts, been the Palestinian social skeleton ever since: refugee camp dwellers, workers, and petty bourgeois intellectuals, virtually all of them of poor or modest, usually peasant, origins.10 In 1947–1949, then, half the population was driven out of their homes. In 1967 this fate befell several hundred thousands more. In 1991, Palestinians were driven out of Kuwait by the hundreds of thousands. A considerable portion of these returned to the occupied territories and beginning in 1994, 150,000 people moved back into Palestine with the Palestinian Authority (PA). These mainly out- but also in-migrations each time profoundly transformed the society and redistributed the political and economic cards, creating new elites and new underprivileged classes. The society was therefore transformed through several seismic shifts. Those of 1947–1949 and 1967 resulted in massive out-migrations, and in the stretching of the society over huge geographical areas and several states, while the events of 1990–1991 and 1994–1995 consisted in involuntary or voluntary in-migrations. The result of the out-migration accompanied each time with the installation of Israeli military occupation over new portions of the country, was the restructuring of the Palestinian social and economic pyramid. From the beginning, as noted by Rosemary Sayigh,11 Palestinian post-Nakba society revealed a “greater readiness for militancy amongst poor as against middle class Palestinians,” a trend that, all the glorification of the role of the PLO bureaucracy and the patriotic merchants to the contrary, continued to be true, and became ever more so, in the succeeding decades of struggle. To quote the same author once again, these peasants (in the case of the Lebanon-based Palestinians studied by Sayigh, camp-based ones) were anxious “to end both their national and their class oppression. It was young workers and students from the camps who became fedayeen, while middle class Palestinians who joined the P.R.M. [Palestinian Revolutionary Movement] moved mainly into ‘white collar’ forms of struggle: organization, diplomacy, information” and did not display the same readiness to die. In the West Bank, the Hashemite monarchy attempted to “Jordanianize” Palestinians, while practicing a discriminatory policy against them and in favor of Transjordanians, even as they created a more or less loyal elite.

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In the second instance, after 1967, the occupation, despite its best efforts,12 shattered the stability of the existing pro-Jordanian elite, and functioned in such a way as unwittingly to empower a new one, whose members chose to identify with the PLO in the quest for legitimacy. Interestingly, the military replaced Jordanian rule, which had in many ways been just as authoritarian, and automatically undermined the pro-Jordanians despite the occupation’s best efforts to prop them up. There resulted a vacuum of elite-level legitimacy, because Israel could of course not be mistaken for an indigenous leadership (whereas the Jordanians had tried to appear to be one). It was impossible for even the most moderate members of the Palestinian social elites to identify with their new rulers in the way they had sometimes been able to do, thanks to a combination of cooptation and intimidation, in regard to the Hashemite regime. During the precise period of time where the occupation was being established, the PLO was going through a period of rapid consolidation under the hegemony of the Fateh movement headed by Yasir Arafat. Fateh and its leadership, but also other PLO member groups such as the PFLP were by definition exile organizations, lacking a strong geographical or (at first) charisma-based relationship to Palestine. In this respect they were comparable to other revolutionary movements, for example the Bolshevik leadership prior to 1917. They had to work to win over the masses. This was not easy at first, and they searched for mobilizing slogans from 1958 to 1965, as shown in their writings (notably in the journal Filistinuna). All the while they were, therefore, a freewheeling bureaucracy, financed by diaspora Palestinians and oil-rich Gulf states, and disposing of employees and troops. This situation coincidentally relieved them of responsibility toward a stable constituency made up in their majority, as noted above, of peasants and proletarianized camp-based refugees. Thus were all kinds of adventurous decisions facilitated, some of which proved positive and some negative, if not disastrous, with respect to the long-term interests of their people as a whole. Fateh’s instinctive launching of a (largely imaginary) armed struggle in 1965 (which it called the “revolution”) was a stroke of genius which, because it was so far from any concrete relationship of forces and potentials on the ground, could only have come from such a “disembodied” leadership, driven, it is true, by the demands of thousands of would-be fedayeen two years later, in the wake of the 1967 defeat, and even more so following the battle of Karameh in 1968. The “armed struggle” did indeed mobilize large portions of the masses, at first in the refugee camps outside Palestine. The “Black September” disaster in Jordan, 1970–1971, resulting in the transfer of the PLO to Lebanon, was brought on by the refusal on the part of the PLO to take the power relationships into consideration, based on the voluntaristic notion that an act of will would create facts, and that King Hussein would not dare to move too forcefully against the fedayeen for a variety of considerations related to inter-Arab relations. Nor did the PLO possess the kind of administrative structure in the Jordanian camps at that time, along with the authority and knowledge of the capabilities of the refugee masses, to lead a successful campaign against the Jordanian army, that is to say, to hold out long 289

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enough for the other Arab states (and notably the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser) to intervene in time and impose a truce. In Lebanon where the PLO next installed its cadre, it was resolved that the mistake (the absence of a power base) would not be made again. As a result, it carved out an area in which it was in effective control (the Lebanese south) and established a true form of governance within the refugee camps, in which it was able in fact to maneuver like “fish in the sea.” The Lebanese period of Palestinian history is one during which the leaders and the masses were most united, and during which the PLO enjoyed an impressive degree of legitimacy among its people in the camps, one which radiated out into other parts of the Arab world, including the occupied territories. There was still a problem related to the only partially embodied quality of PLO administration, and that was the continuous degradation of relations with the Lebanese people and state, paving the way for Israel’s expulsion of the PLO leadership from Lebanon in 1982.13 In the occupied Palestinian territories, meanwhile, the society was transforming itself, with the creation of a dominant camp – but also village-based proletariat.14 Mobility was sharply restricted after the occupation of June, 1967, although thousands of Palestinians were still able to go to the Gulf in the quest for employment. Their remittances could only, in the eyes of the Israelis, increase stability at home. The hundreds of thousands of people who spent some time as day laborers in Israeli agriculture, construction, and tourist infrastructure made up a real proletariat, albeit a special one, since they lived in one society and worked in another. They received (relatively) high wages and were rapidly exposed to the type of Western-oriented, capitalist society that was entirely absent elsewhere in the Arab world, and notably in countries that played host to the Palestinian refugees, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. During the twenty years leading up to the first intifada, this Palestinian proletariat, based principally in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank, developed for the first time a degree of self-confidence combined with anger (because, despite the acceptable level of remuneration, the workers were not given adequate social benefits, because their hours were very long and difficult, and because the daily humiliations of occupation left deep marks) which gradually empowered it. Rather than searching “for leadership”15 among the rising local elites (the PLO-oriented, petty bourgeois intellectuals working in the new Palestinian universities and NGOs, in addition to the local merchant class, who even as their fortunes improved, thirsted for broader horizons closed by the occupation), the Palestinian masses slowly began to search for “a way out.” Their memories of Jordanian repression and anger at a Hashemite regime which had not, prior to the Israeli conquest of 1967, given them the means of defending themselves meant that there was virtually no interest in going back. Anger rose steadily, and the message from the PLO in Lebanon, to wait for their liberation from the outside, no longer had the slightest appeal after the organization had been brushed aside and sent to the far corners of the Arab world (with plush headquarters in Tunis) in the summer of 1982. 290

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If the camp dwellers of Gaza and the West Bank were proletarians, so were, although to a lesser extent, West Bank villagers. The latter were more mixed in their social makeup, although many of their residents joined the same proletariat of day-laborers. A large number of them, as noted by Husain Bargouti “depend on family labor on their parcels of land as well [as on wage labor in Israel], and therefore constitute a fraction of a specific transitional class, the semi-proletariat. The power behind the transformation of peasants into wage workers and semi-wage workers has been the development of capitalism in general and Israeli capitalism in particular . . . Furthermore, some peasants . . . joined in the industrial–commercial section of the petite bourgeoisie. All in all . . . the peasantry was polarizing into either bourgeoisie or proletariat . . .”16 One might add that the vast majority found itself on the proletarian end of that polarization.

The intifada of 1987 revisited The relentless focus on political history and on official decisions, including those of the PLO and its factions or enemies, has come at the expense of the capital extra-political elements, such as health, economics, and social dynamics. This has been particularly true of the literature on the first intifada and its causes. Even where there is a title indicating that social interactions are going to be considered, it turns out to be an essentially political analysis of the parties, as though they, and the broader issues at hand, were monoliths. Farsoun and Landis title their book chapter “The Sociology of an Uprising,” but it is nothing of the sort.17 Instead, it is a description of occupation, oppression, colonization, and reaction thereto. This kind of literature abounds, and reflects the fact that, at the time, but even today, it is difficult to arouse interest in a more differentiated type of analysis stressing the role of the marginalized. A plethora of works was thus produced on the loyalty of the Palestinians to the PLO, which was of course a fact, particularly when the alternatives offered were those presented by the Israelis, the Jordanians, and the international community, always anxious to find solutions they (and not necessarily the Palestinians) can live with. But it would be much more important to know the reaction among the people in Palestine to the polemics within the PLO itself, which were most certainly resonated within the refugee camps in Lebanon. One should not forget that at the eve of the intifada, criticism was mounting, with one prominent member speaking of the “senility” of the top leadership. PLO maneuvering had reached a dead end by the summer of 1987, as is well known. This fact was not lost on the Palestinians living under occupation, and in particular the least privileged among them. Meantime, Israeli measures to counter increasing acts of resistance in the occupied territories, such as the expulsion and imprisonment of many middle class Gazans and West Bankers who had been named to the top positions within the PLO, had the unintended effect of leading to the ascent to positions of responsibility of second-echelon people, who were more representative of the marginalized groups within the society.18 291

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In the economic area too, a reexamination provides evidence of the role of social factors. Macroeconomic indicators played a significant role in the outbreak of the uprising, including the decline in oil remissions and employment in the Gulf.19 But all borders to Israel from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were nearly always open at that time, and perhaps 150,000 workers were doing day labor in Israel in December, 1987. The proletarianized camp dwellers in particular, who never stopped going to their places of work until the struggle began to escalate seriously, showed the way and provided much of the fighting power during the first several months of the intifada.20 The Israeli repressive machine, for one, knew where the resistance was coming from, since measures taken against camps and villages, to which the fighting had rapidly spread, were systematically more comprehensive, stricter, and longer lasting than in the cities.21 Remarkably, and despite the presence of various types of disparate social analyses regarding causes and course of the 1987 intifada, the literature betrays the absence of an overall vision of that process as a social as well as national one, or in fact, of a convincing work that is descriptive of the “rupture” that was the uprising as a whole, from beginning to end.22 This is certainly due to the familiar strictures of grand narrative research on Palestine, but perhaps also because of the difficulty of describing Palestinian society from the ground up for that period, and its articulation as a changed social formation. The first intifada still needs to be understood as one led by the proletariat, followed rapidly by the national bourgeoisie, notably the intelligentsia but including also local small-scale capitalist entrepreneurs. As far as the latter were concerned, it never went as far as conventional accounts would have it. Nobody who lived through the uprising, and certainly not those who fought and led it can agree with the statement that “[w]ithin two weeks of the insurrection that marked the beginning of the uprising in the refugee camps of Gaza, Nablus, and Bethlehem, the battle lines shifted from street confrontations between youthful elements and border police toward a general commercial strike in the urban centers.”23 True, the national bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie had a predominant voice in the deliberations of the UNLU (United National Leadership of the Uprising) and spent much time quarreling with the outside leadership over their decisions, even as the struggle continued, largely self-managed, and centered in the villages and camps. Most of the students and some of the staff of the schools and universities, which were closed during most of the period of the uprising (1988–1993) had in fact returned to their homes, whether urban or rural. The social pyramid had been modified by the years of Israeli occupation. Palestinian society had once again been decapitated with the demise of the pro-Jordanian elites, but its social base had been powerfully solidified with the development of a proletarian consciousness in the camps and cities, as well as the material reinforcement of those who lived there, through their work in Israel. The savings they made at the time would help them to surmount material difficulties resulting from the years of struggle to come.

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The struggle against Israeli occupation and colonization was the primary purpose of the intifada. A secondary purpose was to end forever what remained of any Jordanian hold over the West Bank. This was accomplished de facto within a few weeks of the revolt’s outbreak, and recognized de jure by king Hussein within half a year.24 And when it appeared that the legitimate rulers were preparing to “come home” in 1993–1994, the general appraisal of the uprising was positive, and one can say that, although spearheaded by the camp and village-based proletariat, it was conducted in tandem with the various elements of the local bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy of the PLO in exile. This is in no way to suggest that the Tunis-based PLO and its constituent factions no longer played any role. On the contrary, they continued to command the loyalty of inside activists at every level. But the loyalty was now mixed with the overwhelming fact of agency on the part of insiders, and with the demand for the translation of that agency into participation in decision making. Furthermore, the leading groups with the organization, most notably the hegemonic Fateh grouping, was increasingly subject to a power struggle based largely on generational criteria, which also coincided with significant class differences, the young guard being still closely bound to their village and refugee camp roots, and not having yet gone the way of long-term bureaucrats (which they did rapidly enough during the Oslo period).

The Oslo negotiations and autonomy The Palestinians in the occupied territories and their local PLO leadership, led in the Gaza strip by Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi and in the West Bank by Faysal Husseini, demanded a democratic transformation on the part of their Tunis leadership, as it appeared first possible, then likely, that it would be coming “home.” And indeed, the speed with which the secret Oslo negotiations were conducted, as well as those which followed in seeking ways of implementing the first agreement between Arafat and Rabin of September 13, 1993, was partly due to the frantic efforts being made by the leadership to fend off the pressure from inside, which was in turn responding to pressure from below. Even as the public negotiations were continuing in Washington, DC, and the Oslo discussions were still being carried out in secret, the most prominent among the Washington group, Abdel Shafi, Husseini, and also Hanan Ashrawi and Sa’eb Erakat were threatening to resign if the decision-making process were not made transparent and did not take vital demands (concerning settlements, for example) into account.25 During his negotiations with Rabin and Peres on implementing the Oslo accords, Arafat made it plain that he realized the enormous concessions he had made. A cursory reading of the Oslo negotiating process shows both the extent to which its agenda and various drafts were written by the Israelis of course, but also the extent to which its implications were clear to Arafat (but apparently not to the main Palestinian actors in the negotiations, Mahmud Abbas-Abu Mazen and

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Ahmed Qrei’-Abu Ala’, both of whom were nonetheless later to become prime ministers, and in the former case, president). We can see the importance of the absence of insiders at the talks (they were being excluded precisely because they were insiders and not Tunis-based PLO members) in allowing them to reach an agreement that could never meet the approval of the Palestinian masses. Having once signed the September 13, 1993 “Oslo” accords, Arafat attempted to modify them in the implementation stage as he negotiated over the upcoming interim arrangements. First of all, he accepted during the negotiations to stop the intifada and rescind parts of the Palestinian National charter (and not only those dealing with the denial of Israel’s right to exist, but anything which seemed to contradict the peace process), two of the various concessions that Arafat had in fact refused until the idea of “mutual recognition” was added. This was a masterstroke of Israeli diplomacy, an offer made on July 26, 1993 after six months of nonofficial and two months of sterile official negotiations.26 The whole thing therefore hinged on the abstract and symbolic fact of Israeli and international recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, without sovereignty, and with no limit on the spread of settlements. Then and only then did Arafat agree to an autonomy regime that must inevitably be unpopular. His security chiefs, on the other hand, notably Muhammad Dahlan and Jibril Rujoub, accustomed as they were to the language of violence, thought that they could maintain control over their people in the face of what was sure to be the unease and opposition which Oslo would provoke when its effects on the ground, in the form of the Interim Accords would be felt to the full.27 Arafat thought otherwise. He told Peres from the beginning of the talks on implementing the Oslo accords that he was being offered a set of “bantustans” and that he would not be able to impose their acceptance on the people, arguing that “I rule today not on the basis of a majority but by virtue of my personal credit.”28 This, he made clear, was going to continue even after he arrived in the occupied territories, as he immediately rejected the idea proposed to him by Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, that a grassroots democracy should begin to be put in place.29 As a result, he finally began to co-opt the personalities of the inside by including them in the negotiations, thus bridging the gulf between them and the Tunis-based cadre, and beginning his indirect approach in the direction of the people in the occupied territories. This was short-lived however, since these “inside” elites understood the deeply unpopular nature of the Interim Accords and maintained their distance. And so his dilemma was apparent to him from the beginning. One can only understand his willingness to accede to the conditions of the Israeli side because of his confidence in the type of system that he was being offered, and which resembled that put in place in Lebanon, with the addition of almost unlimited financing by the international community. With this he could surely deal with grassroots opposition. What is even more difficult to understand is something that from the start destabilized the agreement in the eyes of the Palestinian masses. This was his willingness to continue with the negotiations for his return to Gaza even after the 294

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Hebron massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein (January, 1994), and even though Rabin had reneged on his initial commitment to remove the settlers from the city. Perhaps he thought he was making a difficult political situation easier for Rabin,30 which it turned out he was not, but at any rate, the weak negotiating stance of Arafat and his advisers did not go unnoticed. A large question mark had been placed over the whole question of autonomy and its finality, before it even began, and contrary to the propaganda of the time, it is now clear that a confidence gap existed between the leadership and the masses from the start. This is the case even though subsequent public opinion polls consistently showed Arafat to be personally popular, and the peace option to enjoy majority support. The correct reading of these results is surely that peace is in general the preferred option, despite the mistrust felt and always expressed with regard to the Interim Accords (“Oslo” in popular parlance) and the nature of the PA. The distance from reality was in any case considerable to begin with, and with time, after the in-migration of the PLO leadership in 1994, it became even greater as these heroes became parasites and thugs in the eyes of their own people, the disillusionment being as great as the original illusion had been. Social realities had been ignored for decades and were ignored and misunderstood after the return of the PLO to Palestine and this new restructuring of the social pyramid. For the leadership, supported in this vision by the international media, the US and European governments, and Israeli policy-makers, autonomy beginning in 1994 would lead smoothly into an era of statehood, however defined, with the new entity neatly sandwiched between the economic and military giant Israel and its willing partner, the frantically globalizing Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. What did Palestinian society look like on the assumption of responsibilities by the PA? Nothing had changed very much since the end of the 1980s. In the West Bank, the overwhelming majority of people continued to be villagers, carrying their produce to the urban markets which were equidistantly dispersed over the area (Nablus, Hebron, Jerusalem, and so on), even as many of them drew or supplemented their income with day work in Israel or the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the Gaza strip, the overwhelming majority were refugees, that is to say as we have seen, proletarians of a particular sort because their labor was mainly carried out in Israel, far from the heavily populated urban camps in which they lived. They and the West Bank villagers and refugees had spearheaded the uprising that brought the PA back to Palestine. Thousands of people, notably in Gaza, now came increasingly to rely on their modest wages as employees of the PA, after the period of frequent military closures began in 1993. They depended to a great extent on its handouts (which came in turn from the international community) and those of UNRWA. Many Palestinians had thus become rentiers, in the most subaltern sense of the term. Socially, both of these majority groups, villagers and camp dwellers, continued to be doubly alienated. The camp dwellers were separated by distance and culture from their places of work, while the villagers were divided between local habitat and distant day labor. 295

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What is the political mood, what are the ideological predispositions of this vast majority of the Palestinian people? Like the elites, including the middle class and the new monopolistic ruling elite they seek political independence from Israel. But unlike these privileged castes, they simultaneously yearn for political emancipation and economic equality. In short, the Palestinian masses, like so many in other parts of the third world, are the true and perhaps the only ones in the society who are “democrats” through and through. They are democrats in their wish to have an input into the political makeup of the society, as the failures of the autonomy regime became patent by 2000, and they are “redistribution” democrats as well, wanting to find concrete results to their plight. The leaders of the Oslo process on the other hand, as well as the leaders of the opposition to Oslo who willingly or unwillingly remained abroad, have nothing much to gain from democracy in its full, “thick” sociopolitical sense. They have and have had for decades the props and perks of privilege and the added prestige of “representing” the Palestinian people or titles to go with their activities. The question of titles has become very important, during the course of the past ten years. There are countless “directors” and “director generals” in the various ministries and NGOs, as well as “professors” at one or another West Bank university (preferably Birzeit). These elites, and the intellectuals who represented them, had almost without exception begun to comment and to write as though the way had been opened for the creation of a modern democratic state, which was now in the offing, thanks to the exceptional degree of diversity within the PLO and the highly developed civil-society organizations that had been created in the shadows of the occupation and the intifada. This general appraisal was not based on Arafat’s pronouncements or actions, or on those of his assistants. It was more a question of projection, and of the fact that the people decided to give the new authorities the benefit of the doubt. After all, people, and most notably the peasants and camp dwellers, were tired of years of struggle, and longed for a peaceful outcome. That is why in the ensuing years, they remained committed to a peaceful transition to independence. Unfortunately, it was still possible for academic observers of contemporary Palestine to speak of the “process of integrating (or disintegrating) these vibrant social networks [which constitute the “extensive civil society” of the West Bank and Gaza] with the apparatus of state formation that is being built in the areas under the sway of the Palestinian National Authority.”31 It was not possible of course to predict what would happen a mere three years after these lines were written, but one did even at the time sense that state-building was not proceeding as hoped for, because of the nature of the Palestinian regime, and that the civil society in the making was not as vibrant as one had expected a few years before, at the end of the 1987 intifada. The reality, as many discovered within a short time, and most within a few years, was very different. The PLO returned, with its leadership, cadre, and tens of thousands of members of the base. The latter were rapidly absorbed into the society, especially in Gaza, and despite the latter’s already-crowded conditions. 296

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They became modest employees of the PA, often in the security services. Their needs and their status were not very different from those of local people of similar social origins. The cadre and, especially, the high-ranking members of the PLO fared differently. They quickly set up a new type of state-centered monopoly capital, in which they held the key posts and from which they drew the essential benefits. The local bourgeoisie, which had done its part in the previous intifada, and was therefore co-responsible for bringing the new leadership back, were brushed aside in the new order of things. Their material status did not suffer; their social status, on the other hand, did, and very much so. To this rule there are of course a few exceptions, among those “locals” who were able, because of the advantages they offered, to enter the PA at a high level, or who benefited materially from employment in the plethora of local, foreign or international NGOs or UN organizations.32 In addition to their privileges, the new leadership rapidly and justifiably became associated with corruption. The precise degree of that corruption is difficult to establish (except for a few cases publicized over the years), but its reality is undeniable.33 Authoritarianism became another of its hallmarks, as journalists, political opponents, academic dissenters, union activists, and other members of the society were intimidated, imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes (although rarely) killed while in detention.34 Nonetheless, the Palestinian population as a whole, in yet another leap of faith based largely on the relationship between Arafat and the people, gave the PA its backing by and large. All public opinion polls (although those who designed them could to an extent be taxed with a preference for positive outcomes) noted that the peace option remained paramount until the intifada actually broke out in September 2002. The suddenness with which that option was abandoned thereafter does, it is true, reveal the willfulness and superficiality of the support. In February 1996, elections for the presidency of the PA, and for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) further reinforced the legitimacy of the autonomy, despite the disappointment with its shape and ineffectiveness, where concrete results were concerned. The elections witnessed a very high degree of participation, and despite some irregularities, gave a clear majority to supporters of Fateh and Arafat. True, the opposition, both secular and religious, called for a boycott. But this was partly due to the fact that the writing was on the wall: neither Hamas nor one of the (much smaller) PLO-aligned opposition parties could have elected very many representatives to the PLC.35 This is demonstrated by the fact that those parties, which tested the waters, fared miserably. These included the former Communists, now renamed Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) and Fida, the group which under its leader Yasir Abed-Rabbo broke away from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine at the end of the cold war, and became one of the strongest backers of Oslo. In the case of Hamas, principle combined with pragmatism, and it chose to boycott parliamentary, but not local or professional elections. Its slow rise had been based, after its belated creation in December 1987 as an outgrowth of the 297

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Muslim Brotherhood, on combative tactics and a close identification with the marginalized elements of Palestinian society, in both camp and urban settings. Slowly, it was able to prove its effectiveness, particularly in contrast to the rather sclerotic, bureaucratized and corrupt Fateh-connected organizations. Much more interesting for the future than the political results of the elections, which were, after all, universally expected, was the breakdown of votes and the analysis of their results in terms of winners and losers, according to nonpolitical criteria. These results are explained in the important work on the 1996 elections by Jean-François Legrain, Les Palestines du Quotidien,36 to my knowledge the only systematic attempt to find out what people were actually “saying” with their votes. It emerges that the accepted truths about Palestinian society and its system of allegiances are wrong. Overwhelmingly, and in a “quasi exclusive” manner,37 the electors voted for members of their “space of solidarity constituted by the neighborhood or town, village or group of villages, or camp, whatever may have been their political orientation, their own or that of the candidate . . . the defense of the space of solidarity in the geographic sense also led to the transcendence of the tight limits drawn by the circle made up of simply tribal and family ties.” In this regard, villagers bound together and sometimes allied with neighboring refugee camps as against the nearby city (this of course depended on the type of city, some of them, according to Legrain, being historically more prone to unite people than others). The Oslo phase with its one outstanding exercise in democratic practice has made it possible to understand what are the deep ties of solidarity and political affinity that have kept Palestinian society together, and in fact kept it going in the face of the nearly unbearable pressures of the occupation. The close analysis of the results have made it possible to unlock the key to solidarity, struggle and resistance in Palestine, something which Legrain calls “ethno-localism,” and which is familiar to students of the Mediterranean region in general. Within the cities, the breakdown gives similar results: people voted, and thus showed their solidarity, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.38 This demonstrates that contrary to accepted wisdom, notables do not enjoy the confidence of the masses, nor do party leaders. Solidarity passes through the local, that is to say, the locale. It means, on the one hand, that class ties are important to the extent that neighborhoods, camps and villages tend to be internally coherent. It means, on the other hand, that there is a lingering polarization with other quarters, villages, and camps. What is remarkable is that the system as it revealed itself through the 1996 elections, hearkens back to a tradition, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, that is hundreds of years old, and uncovers “the administrative and human geography of the Ottoman period.”39 On the political front, the two main movements were, as during the earlier phase, Fateh and Hamas. Both became internally divided as a result of the signature by Arafat of the Oslo accords. Fateh, for its part, never broke with the Chairman. On the other hand, it held what were to have been the first of a series of elections for its local leaders, in Ramallah in November 1994. A new generation of populist leaders (under Marwan Barghouti) and grassroots militants 298

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ran against a list led by Jibril Rujoub, and close to Arafat. The dissidents won each and every seat on the fifteen-seat executive. “The results also showed up major sectoral divisions in the movement, with the majority of positions going to ex-prisoners, refugees and villagers as opposed to Arafat’s preferred ‘notable’ and ‘resident’ appointees.”40 The Fateh populist victory led Arafat to cancel any further internal elections. But the division had appeared, one based on class, age, and democratic election. And the traditionally disenfranchised had demonstrated that they, and not the elites, were most interested in effecting change through the ballot box when the possibility presented itself. Meanwhile, the principal opposition group, Hamas, found itself in a dilemma, which Fateh and the PA in general were only too happy to accentuate. Hamas had managed, slowly but surely, to pick up a mass following during the first intifada, made up of a social base quite distinct from that of the PLO factions in general, and Fateh in particular. Its members and supporters tended to come from the disinherited popular sectors of the society, camp-based, rural or urban, on the one hand, and the pious middle classes on the other.41 Some of its top leadership were situated on the outside. When the Oslo accords were signed, it did not support them, but it could not afford to appear to be fomenting violence at a time when it seemed that Palestinians from various classes were deciding to give the peace process a chance. As a result, it experienced a division, between radical and moderate wings, the latter of which, located on the inside, was even prepared to create a political party through which to participate in elections and in running the PA.42 One of the advantages it had in relation to the PLO was in the financial area. After the Gulf states cut off funds to the PLO, Hamas continued to receive petrodollars in large quantities. Because of its popularity and its means, it managed to win significant elections in professional unions and in the chambers of commerce in 1992, whether in the West Bank or the Gaza strip. This must have provided an additional incentive to Arafat to conclude a deal with Israel, which he knew would reopen international funding. Divisions in Hamas were therefore along class lines, with the younger but also lower class going into the military wing, ‘Izzadin al-Qassam, the middle classes remaining in the political sphere, and refusing to “know” what the other wing was doing.43 Hamas lost influence when things were going smoothly, but gained in importance when relations between the PLO (and then the PA) and Israel reached a crisis point. The question was, for its members, how to pick up the struggle-minded, nationalist role that the PLO appeared to be shedding. The radical faction wanted to maintain the pressure on Israel at all costs, while the moderates, including, it would appear at that time, the founder and leader of the movement, Sheikh Yasin, were anxious to share in the benefits of government, even though they knew they could only do so from a position of opposition. The broad public of Hamas supporters was divided and fluctuating on the question of which wing to back. But when Arafat was booed at the funeral of an Islamic Jihad leader in late 1994,44 he did not hesitate any longer. He accelerated the process of agreeing on the terms of autonomy and jailed thousands of Islamists. Even during this period, the ‘Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades, 299

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and more generally the military wing of the organization, maintained their autonomy, which Giles Kepel interprets as the autonomy of the lower classes in relation to their leaders, who represented the interests of the middle classes.45 The ingredients for the success, then the collapse of the Oslo process were therefore present from the very start of the autonomy period in 1994. As long as progress or the illusion of progress could be maintained, the PA and Arafat remained sufficiently popular to push through harsh measures. The day when the combination of internal disorganization and corruption, combined with external oppression and colonization, had reached an invisible breaking point, the ingredients for a resumption of struggle would be immediately present, in the form of dissident grassroots Fateh members, Hamas militants, and the millions of poor peasants and camp dwellers, thoroughly disillusioned by the incompetence and corruption of the regime, who would give their support to those who were after all their own children, even as they managed to resist the violent Israeli response through their localist traditions of social and political solidarity. Based on regular public opinion polls, Khalil Shikaki tracked this process throughout the second half of the 1990s. In 1993, Palestinians “immediately” supported the peace process by a two-thirds majority. After a dip in 1994, related to the Hebron massacre, support peaked at 80 percent in 1996. At the time of the elections, Fateh reached its highest level of support, 55 percent (as did Arafat with 65 percent). And during the entire Oslo period, which ended in September 2000, the peace process (as a process) never dropped below 60 percent support. There is no doubt, therefore, that the PA enjoyed real popular legitimacy for the first two years. But the expectation that the process would produce results in the way of political and economic benefits constantly dropped, so that during Ehud Barak’s tenure as Israeli prime minister, and even before the Camp David meetings, only 24 percent had any expectation of success. As support for Fateh likewise dropped steadily during the latter years of the period, support for Hamas did not at first rise.46 This shows that the percentage of people actively looking for another approach to political relations with Israel and the outside world was limited. The Palestinian masses were not supporters of the Islamists per se, rather, they were demanding a change in policy. Hamas, it has been seen, decided not to oppose the process actively, and they did not have a popular mandate to do so. When the intifada began, however, support for Hamas rose dramatically, as the organization showed itself effective in struggle, but no less effective and honest in its management of areas such as health and social services wherever it had the requisite infrastructure.47

Intifada 2000 Not very many people – Edward Said was one of them – came to the rapid conclusion that the Oslo process could not but fail, by deepening the dependence and hopelessness of Palestinian life, under the terms of an unequal accord. “What puzzles me is how so many Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen, academics, 300

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and officials persist in the illusion that the peace process is good for them and their people . . . ” 48 The fact of the matter is that, except for a very few scholars who carefully read the documents at hand most people thought the process would bump along, forward and upward.49 One reason this was not to be is that the society now had an indigenous leadership to blame for what went wrong. For a number of reasons, the leadership had not previously been held accountable, in Jordan or even more importantly, in Lebanon. This time things were different. The failure of the economy to take off, the inability of people to reap material benefits from the years of autonomy, were blamed on the PA.50 Nonetheless, in comparison with the first intifada, macroeconomic issues did not play a significant role in the end of the peace process. Unemployment remained limited and wages were stable in the occupied territories until the revolt began, and there was no global economic downturn either.51 As for the PLO, it was marginalized, forgotten as it were. Prior to Oslo, it had served as a “parliament” in the original sense, where opposing viewpoints were aired, even though it was controlled first to last by Fateh. Now, however, its traditionally oppositional factions (that is to say, those among them which were significant on the ground in the occupied territories) either became a part of the PA (as with Fida and the PPP, which had ministers in the government) or constituted a weak opposition (as with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP) whose top leadership had moved to Ramallah. Although their members and supporters did in general not defect, their support declined, even as their political and intellectual elites lost all popular influence and came to be considered weak followers of the group around Arafat which had effected the Oslo breakthrough. True, there were elements both inside and outside (in Tunis or Damascus) which, as in the case of the long-time leader Farouq Qaddoumi (Abu Lutuf), made known their opposition to Oslo. But like Qaddoumi, these elements were hampered by the fact that they could not or would not propose an alternative. They did not therefore have any significant impact on the marginalized among the Palestinian people, most notably the truly forgotten diaspora refugees. Along with the virtually universal perception, among the Palestinian masses, that the PA was inefficient and corrupt (this perception rose to 83 percent by the year 2000), the willingness to use violence against Israel rose, from 20 percent during the early years of the autonomy period, to 52 percent in July 2000, that is to say, before even the Camp David fiasco; one year later, during the height of the uprising, support for violence had reached the record level of 86 percent.52 Meantime support for Arafat and Fateh were dropping steadily, to respectively 33 percent and 21 percent in 2001. The juxtaposition of the figures shows the intimate relationship between the political and the social conflict in the 2000 intifada, that is to say, the readiness to undertake a rupture once again and resort to direct action, in reaction to the failing of Israel, the peace process, and the PA itself. There was never any question of a civil war breaking out, but the message was clear: the purpose of the intifada was to produce that which the years of autonomy had failed to bring about, namely honest and effective government 301

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bereft of favoritism, turned toward the needs of the marginalized people in the camps and villages. There are three competing interpretations of the outbreak of the uprising: that it was willed by Arafat; that it was caused by the Fateh young guard wishing to seize the initiative and ultimately power from the old guard; and that it was initiated by the disgruntled masses, who gave support to the initiatives of militants from every side who went into battle. The evidence supports the third thesis. The first, dear to the Israelis and some Palestinians (for opposite reasons: the former because they demonized the man and wished to find a culprit, the latter because they believed he was in charge at the time of the resumption of the uprising) does not stand, if only because he tried at Camp David to come to an agreement along the lines offered to him by Barak and Clinton, and was prevented from doing so by pressure from the society (Palestinian in the case of the refugees, international– Islamic, regarding the status of Jerusalem). The second theory is bureaucratic in nature, and does not stand up to scrutiny either, because it assumes that people, after years and decades of suffering, are willing, without being controlled by a dictatorial regime, to offer support and to give their lives for a cause which is not dear to their hearts. The third one may incorporate elements of the other two. Arafat had to go along with the explosion once it had occurred, if he wished to preserve his position; and the members of the populist young guard, representing the Palestinian masses, led the revolt in the name of those who willed it: the marginalized of Oslo, that is to say, the majority of the Palestinian people. The young guard in Fateh drew strength from their alliance with the Islamist opposition,53 because they were, as noted above, representing the same social underclass, which had since the beginning of the process been in an adversarial dialectic with their old guards, who represented the new middle classes, referred to in the Palestinian literature as the new elites. Social tension and in some cases social conflict resulted from the increasing class stratification within the society, even as the occupation somewhat lowered its profile, leaving these Palestinian elites as the visible adversary, the palpable exploiter. By 1999 the tensions had given rise to clashes, particularly between camp and city dwellers, notably in Ramallah and Nablus, where geographic proximity made contrasts in living conditions all the more palpable. Labor union leaders were jailed for leading strikes by teachers for an improvement in their unacceptably low pay (particularly as compared to the thousands of ministry directors and directors general, or higher officers in the dozen or so security agencies), radio stations and TV channels were shut down for criticizing or even publicizing the struggle and the plight of these people. The PA had a ministry of information and a ministry of NGO affairs (or as it was officially called, with unconscious irony, wizarat al-munadhamat al-ahliyyah – ministry of popular organizations), neither of which should have existed in a government striving for democracy. In the summer of 2000 class tensions rose further, with the occasional use of weapons in conflicts which were in their essence social, but which tended to 302

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appear in national or even criminal guise. At the same time, the Palestinian masses played a key role in holding their leadership in check at the Camp David talks, thus succeeding for the first time since 1988 in imposing their political will on the PLO bureaucracy. But the system established under Oslo and developed by the PA was indirectly responsible for the terrible breakdown of Camp David and for making it possible to blame the PLO for it. Had the leaders had better channels to their masses, they would have had a clearer idea of what their people thought, and would not, despite Clinton’s and Barak’s desperate pressure, have consented to going in the first place, based on what they knew they would and would not be offered. They were not prepared, and the concessions they were prepared to make were unacceptable (notably with regard to Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements) to their people. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the so-called old guard got the message more quickly than the new guard while at Camp David (Muhammad Dahlan and Jibril Rujoub were slow to understand that they could not make all of the required concessions). It had also sunk in after the Camp David failure that the opportunity would not be available in the near future, through the polls, for the people to express their will by electing their representatives, not at the municipal, not at the parliamentary and not at the presidential level (the latter being the only level where Arafat could be sure to win by a landslide). When the intifada broke out in response to Sharon’s provocations and the wanton killing of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, especially in the Jerusalem haram area, the escalation was rapid and, in contrast to 1987, both quantitative and qualitative. There was no question for anyone witnessing the events as to who was from the start at the forefront: the Palestinian masses, self-organized and led by their organizations, Fateh’s Tanzim and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades under populist and opposition-minded people like Marwan Barghouti, as well as the militias of Hamas – ‘Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades – and the Islamic Jihad – Saraya al-Quds. The PA was marginalized from the beginning, and very rapidly it dissolved de facto through its absence from the scene. This absence was noticed by all, and when mass rallies could be held, which was not frequently possible because of the violence of the Israeli response to crowds approaching their positions, they were neither organized nor frequently addressed by PA members. Of course the PA could never have gotten a mass gathering together, and it did not in fact have a strategy. Mass meetings only occurred on the occasion of funerals or during attempts to break through the Israeli siege, by forcing a roadblock. Grassroots militants could garner a mass audience but certainly nobody from the PA, contrary to conventional accounts, which continued to stress the role of the leadership, and Arafat’s popularity.54 It is interesting to note that the contrasting perception of events, based on whether they were viewed from above or from below, resulted in the telling of accounts so different that they did not seem to describe the same occurrences. There was no official plan for the intifada, and there were no official strategies or even tactics for it either. The negotiators attempted fruitlessly to extract from it better terms from the Israelis, which they briefly managed to do in December 2000 303

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and January 2001, but probably only because the participants knew it was a futile effort, expressing what they felt Camp David should have yielded. The society rapidly went back to its well-practiced reflex of self-organization. Palestinians have for the most part self-managed their daily affairs since the beginning of Israeli rule in 1967, and the society is so successful at it because, as described above in relation to the meticulous quantitatively based research of Jean-François Legrain, it has been doing it for centuries. Certainly it is difficult to understand the ability of the Palestinians to persevere under the conditions that have been imposed upon them by the occupation, by way of military and economic measures, and especially through the closures policy that has resulted in the creation of literally hundreds of separate enclaves. It is thanks to the localism and traditional family economy of Palestinians that they have been able to continue, and rendered inoperative the claims of the Israeli military and civilian leaderships that they can and will crush every last vestige of resistance. Indeed, the camp dwellers and the villagers have, just as much as the Israeli occupation, held Arafat in check and made it impossible for him to carry through various attempts at compromise, including that of the first prime minister, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), elected president on the death of Yasir Arafat. The legitimacy of the PA rests on the continuation of a coherent social praxis among the people, rather than the conventional reverse, top-down conception whereby the society was legitimated and held together by the cogency of its leadership, the PLO, then the PA. This was finally recognized as the intifada progressed, both by the PA and by foreign circles, whose studies began to deal with the perceptions and needs of the “poor,” a term intended to provide an aura of neutrality when designating the masses. Examples of such studies abound, and include the report submitted in 2003 by Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (though he makes it abundantly clear that he is actually talking about the vast majority of the people), the World Bank report for 2003, and the successive reports financed by the Swiss Foreign Ministry during the years of the al-Aqsa intifada.55 Each of these reports implicitly recognized (but with no attempt at explanation) the paradox of spreading poverty and continued resistance. The key to understanding the paradox lies in the approach of the present study. It is an unusual approach, based simply on the fact that Palestinian history has been written as an ultra-political process, and not linked to the history of Palestinian society. This approach as yet shows no signs of penetrating the scholarly literature (journalists have done much better in this regard), which continues to seek elite-centered explanations.56 Paradoxically, it is a comprehensive study carried out by the PA itself, in conjunction with the UNDP, that contains, in its hundreds of pages, the key to the puzzle, and which deserves to be read and analyzed with great care, as an explosive primary source. That is the Participatory Poverty Assessment of the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC) published in 2002.57 Because of its great length (hundreds of pages covering all 304

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of the regions in Gaza and the West Bank), and its reliance on qualitative research methods rather than statistics, it is unlikely to attract a significant readership. It shows a clear picture, based on interviews and surveys, whereby, if the PA wishes to survive it must do more by way of addressing the needs of the “poor,” that is to say the overwhelming majority of the population: the masses who reside in villages and camps. This is because camp dwellers, and it would seem, even more the villagers, have no trust in the PA at all. The various ministries, including agriculture, health,58 education, social affairs, and local government, are considered unfair, nepotistic, inefficient, and corrupt. Through a reading of the multivolume study, one realizes the extent to which people are in fact aware of the function and detailed operation of public programs. UNRWA receives slightly (but not decisively) better marks, as do NGOs. The Islamic charitable societies are rated highest by far, in terms of efficiency, professionalism, and honesty. These studies are revealing, and they contained an implicit and often an explicit threat to the PA led by Fateh. That threat was taken seriously it would seem, but only to the extent that some PA members began to call for the dissolution of the PA. This would of course not have solved the problem then or later, nor would it very much alter the situation on the ground, where the PA had little impact. Meantime, the people maintained their confidence in their own popular organizations, whether secular or religious. Elections were and remain a deeply felt need. But these cannot be limited to the presidential level, where (as nearly everywhere in the world) the inevitable choice is restricted to one person (in the West, to two people arguing for the same policies). Palestinians for years clamored for local and then parliamentary elections, in which they could bring about change based on their proven priorities, and their rejection of policies adopted since 1994. Throughout the period of the al-Aqsa intifada the primary conflict was with Israel. But the internal, class-based contradictions likewise continued and were accentuated, becoming critical in several areas. One example among many was the city of Nablus, the only really urban society, where the level of violence became particularly high, or at least highly reported. The massive military assaults on Nablus concentrated on the Qasaba (old city) and Balata camp.59 This was where resistance was entrenched, the bourgeoisie having long since deserted their mansions in the Qasaba for the northern suburbs. Raids concentrated on the Qaryoun, Ras al-Ein, and Yasmina quarters, “the poorest and most crowded neighborhoods of the old city,” and on Balata. They were this particular time searching for Tanzim and al-Aqsa brigades leaders, whom they were despite the violence and the threats unable to locate. The PA was heavily criticized for its passivity and its absence. At the funeral of three people killed by the Israeli military, hostile chants were heard, to the effect that “we don’t want ministers of a Legislative Council. We want an honorable national Palestinian leadership comprised of all the factions.” Violence in Nablus was also to be placed in the context of the corruption of the PA,60 and the suspicion existed that many of the violent acts were actually carried out by the PA. This violence was also identified in Gaza, where its underlying motives were said to be similar. Eyad El Sarraj 305

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noted in that regard that:61 “if you are an ordinary person who isn’t involved in politics or clan feuds, you’re absolutely safe. There’s no anonymous or random or chaotic violence here. That hasn’t changed. And you can’t say society is disintegrating in that the tribal or clan structure is still very much intact.” Amidst this internal strife, this deep split between the society’s elites and its masses, what can be seen as having been the objectives of the popular intifada? Perhaps Marwan Barghouti gave an accurate if very general answer.62 He was a genuine and popularly-based leader, one whom as explained above, the PA from Arafat down attempted unsuccessfully to keep in check. His arrest by the Israeli military in 2002 solved the problem at least temporarily, but this was a misunderstanding of the roots of his popularity: it was based on his social and political aims as perceived by the Palestinian people, and not on his alleged (and in fact, contestable) charisma. For Barghouti, it was clear that the intifada destroyed the Oslo agreement, which had simply in the end perpetuated the occupation by reorganizing it. It not only destroyed Oslo as an agreement with Israel, but it also challenged and continued to challenge the PA and all political organizations, regarding their policies in all areas, economic, political, and military. Negotiations, he argued, may proceed, but the popular uprising had to continue at the same time. In this regard, his vision of the intifada was clearly a social one and not merely a national one. Corruption, he argued, needed to be rooted out, something, he noted, that the PA, for self-evident reasons, was reluctant to do. Elections needed to be held, whatever may be the conditions on the ground. A new political order needed to be created, democratic, transparent and based on economic “steadfastness.” Remarkably, the prescriptions of Barghouti closely matched those of the Palestinian “poor,” that is to say, the vast majority of people, as carefully canvassed in MOPIC’s 2002 Participatory Poverty Assessment analyzed above. Martin Beck has shown how the authoritarian quality of the PA is strengthened by international actors,63 who work to distend the relationship between the political elites and the people, on the assumption that the peace process depends on the existence of a Western-oriented and therefore socially autonomous (that is to say, nonaccountable) regime. There is no doubt that the international community played a significant role in events leading up to the explosion of September 2000. In so doing, he states, the underclass was further marginalized. With this international support, the executive was encouraged in its continued sidetracking of the Palestinian Legislative Council,64 Arafat having refused to sign and thus enact PLC-passed legislation even through the two intifada years, 2001 and 2002. The autonomy of the PA, however, had shown itself to be as nothing in comparison with the autonomy of the Palestinian camp dwellers and villagers. The Oslo process had, as has been shown, altered the pinnacle of the Palestinian pyramid. The public-cum-private monopolies in the economic field, enjoyed by returnee political and business leaders, altered the balance within the elites, marginalizing the traditional indigenous small capitalists and co-opting a large new petty-bourgeois, highly Westernized intelligentsia. It continued to exclude 306

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the broad masses of proletarianized refugees and villagers, whose material conditions deteriorated regularly, particularly with the upsurge in resistance in September 2000. A self-managed society then reemerged, this time seeking not only its means of self-expression, which to some extent it found, but also to impose representative and fair practices on the leadership. The latter showed no sign of responding to the pressure from below, and continued despite the terrible damage inflicted by the Israeli military to seek salvation in traditional strategies of rule, and in its relationships with the international community. Change in that relationship became a part of the people’s agenda, but nothing showed that years of renewed struggle had brought it any closer, on the contrary. This is surely why, when parliamentary elections were finally held in January 2006, the longtime political and social underclass carried the day. What needs to be noted is that the steady progression of Hamas (culminating in its victory, which was ensured by a majority of electors who did not identify themselves as Hamas members, including a majority of women, but who were opting for change) came despite the progressive reduction in its international funding after 1994, coinciding with the prodigious increase in financial support for the PA, much of which (aside from those portions which lined official pockets) was spent on rewarding Fateh sympathizers with jobs in the security services and the ministries. The Palestinian masses showed that they could not be bought: more, that they rejected their intended co-optation, while rewarding those whom they felt had served them best, in the social and economic fields,65 but also in terms of strategies of liberation.66

Conclusion Twentieth-century Palestinian history has, in the telling, emphasized political, notably national, processes, with the bulk of attention going to the activities and proclamations of the elites, as well as political projects and military activities. This is not only true of the journalistic, but also and especially the scholarly literature. Social cleavages, interactions and struggles have largely been overlooked, and it is perhaps for this reason that decision-makers, whether Palestinian, Israeli, or international, as well as commentators, have been surprised by events on the ground, again and again. The attempt was made here to demonstrate that, to a great extent, the Palestinian uprising that erupted on September 28, 2000 was from the beginning endowed with a dual nature, national, and social. It was on the one hand, as generally acknowledged, the continuation of a movement of national resistance by the dispossessed against the Israeli occupation, after a seven-year hiatus based on the Oslo accords. But it was also, significantly, a movement imposed by these dispossessed on their own political, social and cultural elites, deemed responsible for the general degradation of living conditions as well as widespread corruption during the period in which they exercised limited autonomy in relation to the occupation forces, as well as far-going administrative and economic control over Palestinian society. The efforts and the sacrifices of the 307

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intifada were borne by the people of the refugee camps and villages, many of them day laborers, some of them peasants, most of them unemployed (although its eruption was associated with a Palestinian city – Jerusalem – unlike the uprising of December 1987, which began in the refugee camps). Members of the PA initially opposed the renewal of active resistance, largely because they had much to lose from the annulment of the Oslo accords, which had catapulted them and their allies among the intelligentsia and business community to the material level of first world middle or upper middle classes. In response to the seizing of the initiative on the part of these marginalized elements and their spokespeople, the leadership of the PA, left intact by Israeli countermeasures, split over the emerging social cleavage. Yasir Arafat, always attentive to preserving his popular base, appeared to side with the dispossessed in their social/national struggle. Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and others took the lead in actively opposing the intifada. The Palestinian elites lined up behind one or another of these two approaches. This time, the marginalized majority did not allow themselves to be guided by the best advice of the international community and sections of their own leadership, to the effect that their sufferings would be ended by the unconditional return to an agreement with Israel, even in the absence of favorable developments on the ground and within the domestic political and social system. Their class leadership, within organizations such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, were heavily decimated by Israeli military strikes and the imprisonment of thousands among them. It was not clear whether and for how long the disenfranchised camp dwellers and villagers could continue to find the means to express and impose themselves in the face of overwhelming pressure by the international community, the occupier and large fractions of their own political, economic, social and cultural elites. Whether or not they lose a particular round, however, their determination could not be broken, because of the nature of social networks of solidarity. And it is safe to infer from a quarter century (and much more) of Palestinian history that the marginalized people of the Palestinian patchwork of towns, camps and villages, will in the long run bring about social and political transformations. What Palestine, paradoxically, has in common with all other postcolonial situations is its uniqueness. The particular form of universal exceptionalism we are dealing with here is rooted in the length of the anticolonial struggle and its asymmetrical quality. There is really no chance for that quality, despite the projections of demography-bound futurologists, to be altered. Within the confines of Palestinian exceptionalism, the models of Chatterjee and Massad, superimposed, are particularly applicable. The endless struggle, with all of its ups and downs, as well as the evident lack of a short-term solution (all Road Map and Geneva Accord-type plans to the contrary) places Palestinian society within a combination of the Chatterjee’s three moments simultaneously, those of departure, maneuver and arrival, and Massad’s third and fourth, a combination of the expansion and contraction of the nation, and internal implosion. The nearly unbearable pressures that the simultaneous superposition of those moments places on the Palestinians 308

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are nonetheless being borne, and it would seem, can be projected into an indefinite future. This is because of the key role played by Palestine’s apparently indomitable subaltern classes. They not only bear the brunt of Israeli violence, but find it in themselves, when consulted by their own leadership to elect those by whom they are best represented in both social and political terms, despite the ferocious response of the occupiers and the international community.

Notes 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3. 2 Edward D. Said, “Foreword,” in Guha and Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, VI. 3 Wicks, Alexis, Le spectre de la nation: Amilcar Cabral et le nationalisme, Paris: Maîtrise thesis, Univesity of Paris VII – Denis Diderot, 2003, 26. 4 Roger Heacock, “Vers une nouvelle épistémologie de l’histoire palestinienne,” in Confluences – Méditerranée, 43(Fall 2002): 13–21. 5 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23. 6 Ibid., 50–1. 7 Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 9–10. 8 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 153. 9 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity. The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 36–9. 10 Ibid., 47–9 and 179–80. 11 Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 1979), 153. 12 Martin Beck, Friedensprozess im Nahen Osten: Rationalität, Kooperation und politische Rente im Vorderen Orient (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 290. 13 Henry Laurens, Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient – L’Orient arabe et le monde de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999), 312–13; Georges Corm, Le Proche-Orient éclaté – 1956–2003, 3rd Edition (Paris: Folio/histoire, 2003), 430–1. Corm, a progressive Lebanese researcher, is perhaps excessively careful not to appear too anti-Palestinian, and blames the Palestinian “left,” wrongly in our opinion, for much of the tension, sparing Fateh and Yasir Arafat. 14 Hiltermann claims that although West Bankers were “depeasantized” in the process, they were never “proletarianized” because they continued to live in their villages instead of moving to urban centers. This is only true in the most mechanistic of senses, as their villages became their working-class commuter-style dormitories. Cf. Joost Hiltermann, “Work and Action: The Role of the Working Class in the Uprising,” in Jamal Nassar and Roger Heacock (eds), Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990), 145. 15 Emile Sahliyeh, In Search of Leadership: West Bank Politics since 1967 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1988). 16 Bargouti, Husain Jameel, “Jeep Versus Bare Feet – The Villages in the Intifada,” in Nassar and Heacock (eds), Intifada, 111. 17 Samih K. Farsoun and Jean M. Landis, “The Sociology of an Uprising: The Roots of the Intifada,” in Nassar and Heacock (eds), Palestine at the Crossroads, 15–36. 18 Yazid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 605–10.

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19 Samir Abdallah, “The Effects of Israeli Occupation on the Economy of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” in Nassar and Heacock (eds), Intifada, 45–50. 20 Adel Yahya, “The Role of the Refugees in the Uprising,” in Nassar and Heacock (eds), Intifada, 95. 21 Roger Heacock, “From the Mediterranean to the Gulf and Back Again: The Palestinian Intifada and the Gulf War,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 13(Winter/Spring 1991): 71. 22 Salim Tamari, “Social Science Research in Palestine: A Review of Trends and Issues,” in Les Cahiers du Cermoc, 17(Amman: CERMOC – Centre de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain, 1997), 31. 23 Salim Tamari, “The Revolt of the Petite Bourgeoisie – Urban Merchants and the Palestinian Uprising,” in Nassar and Heacock (eds), Intifada, 163. 24 Massad, Colonial Effects, 14. 25 Roger Heacock, “Les Etats-Unis et l’accord du 13 septembre 1993,” in Confluences – Méditerranée, 9(Winter 1994): 150. 26 Uri Savir, The Process. 110 Days that Changed the Middle East (New York: Random House, 1998), 50. 27 Ibid., 102. 28 Ibid., 104. 29 Ibid., 95. 30 Ibid., 121–35. 31 Salim Tamari, “Social Science Research in Palestine,” 20. 32 Joseph A. Massad, “Political Realists or Comprador Intelligentsia: Palestinian Intellectuals and the National Struggle,” Critique (Fall 1997): 21–35. 33 Roger Heacock, “Intifada: Das Erwachen der Palästinenser in Palästina,” in Fritz Edlinger (ed.), Befreiungskampf in Palästina – Von der Madrid Konferenz zur al-Aqsa intifada (Vienna: Promedia, 2001), 20; Gilles Kepel, Jihad: Expansion et déclin de l’islamisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 317–18; Roger Heacock, “Arafat, les Palestiniens et l’Occident: Un malentendu triangulaire,” in Les Cahiers de l’Orient, 67(Third Trimester, 2002): 16–17; Usher, Graham, Palestine in Crisis – The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 62–5; Beck, Friedensprozess, 274–9. 34 Usher, Palestine in Crisis, 65–77. 35 Jean-François Legrain, Les Palestines du Quotidien (Amman: CERMOC – Centre de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain, 1999), 413. 36 Ibid., passim. 37 Ibid., 101. 38 Ibid., 102. 39 Ibid., 102–3. 40 Usher, Palestine in Crisis, 75. 41 Kepel, Jihad. 42 Ibid., 318. 43 Ibid., 320–2. 44 Ibid., 323–4. 45 Ibid., 417–18, 418 fn. 6. 46 Shikaki, Khalil, “Palestinians Divided,” in Foreign Affairs, 81(January–February 2002), 92. 47 Hélène Fuger, “Le mouvement islamique palestinien comme mouvement social,” in Les Cahiers du Cermoc, 17 (Amman: CERMOC – Centre de recherches sur le MoyenOrient contemporain, 1997), 331. 48 Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process – Oslo and After, Second Edition (London: Granta Books, 2002), 7. 49 Jean-François Legrain, “Palestine: Les bantoustans d’Allah,” in Les Cahiers du Cermoc, 17(Amman: CERMOC – Centre de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient contemporain, 1997), 85–101.

310

THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA

50 Ben Yishai, Ariel, “Palestinian Economy, Society, and the Second Intifada,” in Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Electronic Journal 6(3), September 2002 ([email protected]). 51 Cf. MAS – Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, Social Monitor, 6(March 2003): 43. 52 Shikaki, “Palestinians divided,” 92. 53 Ibid., 95. 54 See for example Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari, “Anatomie einer anderen Rebellion,” in Edlinger (ed.), Befreiungskampf in Palästina, 141–2; Georges Malbrunot, Des pierres aux fusils: Les secrets de l’Intifada (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), passim. 55 Riccardo Bocco et al., Palestinian Public Perceptions of Their Living Conditions, Reports I through VI (Geneva: Graduate Institute of Development Studies, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). 56 See for example Jamil Hilal, Takwin al-nukhba al-filistiniya mundhu nushu’ al-haraka al-wataniya al-filistiniya ila ma ba’d qiam al-sulta al-wataniya (The Formation of the Palestinian Elite, from the Rise of the Palestinan National Movement to the Period of the Palestinian National Authority) (Ramallah: Muwatin, 2002); and Salim Tamari, “Review Essay: Who Rules Palestine?,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 31(Summer 2002): 102–13. 57 Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) Project, Relationship between the Poor and the Different Institutions: Learning from the Poor (Ramallah: Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation and UNDP, 2002). 58 See also Michaela V. Pfeiffer, Vulnerability and the International Health Response in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: An Analysis of Health and the Health Sector (Jerusalem: World Health Organization, November 2001). 59 Atef Saad, “If Nablus Falls, What is Left?,” in Palestine Report (Jerusalem: January 7, 2004). 60 Idem, “ ‘Lawless’ City Demands Action,” in Palestine Report (Jerusalem: December 10, 2003). 61 Eyad El Sarraj, “Suicide Bombers: Dignity, Despair, and the Need for Hope,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 4(Summer 2002): 76. 62 Marwan Barghouti, spoken contribution to a workshop organized by Birzeit University’s Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies (IALIIS), Ramallah, January 2002. 63 Martin Beck, “The External Dimension of Authoritarian rule in Palestine,” Journal of International Relations and Development 3/1(March 2000): 47–66. 64 MAS, 47–8. 65 The designation of Fateh as the “official” party and Hamas as the “popular” party has now entered the academic mainstream, which does in itself (yet) mean that the distinction is misplaced (Talal ‘Oukil, “Afaq al-talhawwal dakhil fateh fi al-marhala al-jadida” [“The perspectives for change within Fateh during the present stage”], in Majallat al-dirasat al-filistiniyya [Journal of Palestine Studies, Beirut], 62(Spring 2005): 58–65 (59). 66 This clearly emerges from the public opinion poll conducted by Dr Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (Ramallah: PSR, June, 2005) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between June 9 and 11, 2005. It is an important poll, because, while continuing to project a significant electoral advantage for Fateh (everybody, including the victors, were surprised by the result) it clearly exposes people’s primary concerns: fighting corruption and inequalities, while resisting occupation.

311

INDEX

Abadan, unemployment 95 Abbas, Mahmud (Abu Mazen) 304, 308 Abdullah, Hasan 79 Abrahamian, Ervand 143 Abu’l-Dhahab, Muhammad Bey 28 Afary, Janet 50, 143–4 Ahmad Bey 219 al-‘Abd, Hasan Agha 39 al-‘Amara 31 al-‘Azm, As ‘ad Pasha 29, 43–4 al-Bakri, Khalil 38 al-Budayri, Ahmad 38, 39, 43–4 al-Dimashqi, Mustafa 35 al-‘Imadi, Hamid 38 al-Mulk, Qavam 58 al-Rifa‘i, Hasan 35 al-Salihiyya (suburb of Damascus) 28, 36 Alexandria, porters 73–4 Algiers, emancipated slave women 200–7 ‘Ali Bey, rebellion 28 Althusser, Louis 284 anarchist movement, Egypt 241–2 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 153–4 Anglo-Tunisian convention, 1863 216 Arafat, Yasir 289, 293–300, 301, 303, 308 Ardebil 56 armatoloi (militia) 265–6 Astarabad, cholera 56 Asterides, K. 247, 250, 252 Astoin (case history) 230 Azarbayjan 154 Bakhtiar, Shahpour 93 Bakhtiyari nomads 155 Bakhtiyari peasants (Chahar Mahal) 147–51, 153, 154, 164

banditry 16–18; amnesty 274; depictions 160; during Greek interregnum 275; in Greek war for liberation 267–9; under Kapodistrias 269–71; under King Otto 271–5; in Ottoman-occupied Greece 263–6; as resistance 158–61; role of women 271 banishment, Gypsies 191–2 Barany, Zoltan 175–6 Bardo, palace complex in Tunis 217–18, 221–2 Barghouti, Marwan 298, 303, 305 bast-nishini (refuge) 102 Bazargan, Mehdi 97 Beik, William 42 Bennani-Chraïbi, Mounia 124 Béranger, Philippe 221 Binning, Robert 51, 53–4 Black September 289 Blili, Leila Temime 216–17, 219 bourgeoisie, Egypt 253 bread, shortages 32–3 bread riots 7–8, 39, 40, 41, 43–4, 54–6 Bulaq 74–6, 79 Bushire 57 Cairo 27, 74–6 Camp David 303 Carrières Centrales 119, 121, 130, 132 Carter, Jimmy 92 “Carterite breeze” 92 Casablanca 117 cash nexus, Egypt 71, 72, 84 Celali Revolts 175 Çelebi, Evliya 180–1, 182 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 91

313

INDEX

Doumas, Nicolas 244, 248 Dufferin, Lord (Frederick HamiltonTemple-Blackwood) 81

Chahar Mahal movement (Bakhtiyari peasants) 147–51, 153, 154, 164 Chatterjee, Partha 286–7, 308 chiliarchies (military/gendarmerie) 270–1 Chorofylake (gendarmerie) 272 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 91 cigarette workers 245–9 Çingene, origin and use of term 179–80 civil war, Damascus 38 coal heavers 70–3 colonial rule, Egypt 80–4 colonialism, European 285 commodification, Egypt 84–5 conscription, Pahlavi Iran 160 consular missions, Tunisia 223–4 Consultative Assembly of Representatives 77, 81–2 contemporary accounts; ambivalence 43; local knowledge 27; perspective 40; of popular protests 26–7; of protests during Mamluk period 32–5; of protests during Ottoman period 35–40; terminology 31–2, 43 Council of the Unemployed Workers 100 counterfeiting, Gypsies 183–4 courthouse, symbolism 39–40 crime, amongst servants 225 Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring) 72, 81, 83 crowds: cohesion 40; diffidence 41–2; discipline 40; diversity 27–32; gathering for prayer 28; as historical puzzle 25; longitudinal study 27; during Mamluk period 32–5; during Ottoman period 35–40; Ottoman understanding 44; as politically useful 28; resources for study 26; role in protests 5–8; stereotypes 25

Ecumenical Patriarch 264 Egypt: anarchist movement 241–2; bourgeoisie 253; cigarette workers 245–9; cigarette workers’ strike 1899 245–7; cigarette workers’ strike 1901 247; cigarette workers’ strike 1903 247–8; definitions of foreign workers 239–40; ethnic workers’ groups 254; Free Popular University 250–1; historical sources 238; industrial action 243; international unions 242–3; internationalist discourse in labour movement 251–5; labour press 249–50; modernization 240–1; National Party 253–4; nationalists 253–4; resistance leagues 243; strike breakers 248; studies of foreign workers 237–8; union leadership 243–5; widening union participation 248; workers’ publications 238 Election Law, Egypt 1883, 81–2 elections, local 77–80 electricity fraud 118, 127–31 elites, relations with subaltern groups 85 elitism, of historical records 26 employees of state, as focus of protest 33 employment, women in Iran 52–3 entertainers, Gypsies 182 ethnicity 29, 185–7, 239–40, 254 Ethnofylake (National Guard) 272 Europeans 224, 227 executioners, Gypsies 184 Exmouth, Lord (Edward Pellew) 218–19

Damascus: actions of Governors 28; bread riots 39; civil war 38; disorders, 1757–1758, 31; Mamluk period 30; resources for study of crowds 26; transition to Ottoman rule 27 Darling, Linda 175 democracy, Palestine 296 demonstrations 34, 40 deviance, for legitimate gain 124 disarmament, Pahlavi Iran 162–3 discourse, internationalist 251–5 domestic service 216–17 Dorostkar, Zahra 97

Fanon, Franz 284–5 Fassy family (case history) 228–9 Fateh 289, 298–300, 302, 305 fatwa 41–2 Fedaii Organization 92, 93, 100–1 fedayeen 288 Feise, Godfrey 218 feminism, Iran 50 feuds, ethnic 29 Fida 297 Fillieule, Olivier 124 food prices 38 foreign workers 15–16 fortune tellers, Gypsies 184 Foruhar, Dariush 96–7

314

INDEX

counterfeiting 183–4; criminality 173–4; as entertainers 182; ethnicity and state classification 185–7; exclusion from military 188; as executioners 184; as fortune tellers 184; historical sources 177–8; historical studies 175–6; judicial punishment 191–2; legal status 185; liva-i çingane (sub-province of the Gypsies) 185–7, 192–3; marginalized professions 3, 181–5; as metalsmiths 183; Muslim and non-Muslim 189; prejudice against 192; professions 181–5, 192; prostitution 182–3, 187; relations with Ottoman state 174–5, 183–4, 188, 192; relative marginality 178; religious beliefs and practice 180–1; resistance to state administration 190; spatial exclusion 178, 184; state administration 184–7; stereotyping 184–5; taxation 187, 188–90, 193

France 42 fraud 74–5, 118 Free Popular University (UPL) 250–1, 252 Freundlich, Samuel 244 gangs, Damascus 30 General Assembly, Egypt 81–2 George I, King of Greece (George Glyxbourg) 274–5 Gerber, Haim 36 Geremek, Bronislaw 178 Ghazvin, protest by unemployed 100 Gianaclis, Nestor 246 Gigu, Colonel 160 Ginio, Eyal 176, 179, 189–90, 193 Giza, measurers 75–6 Gli Operai (The Workers) 251, 252 Goldenburg, Solomon (also Goldemburg) 244 governesses, Tunis 226–7 Governors, Damascus 28, 30, 33, 36–7 Graham, Stephen 117 Gramsci, Antonio 2, 3, 18, 19, 19n Greece: amnesty for bandits 274; banditry and piracy under Kapodistrias 269–71; banditry and piracy under King Otto 271–5; banditry during Ottoman occupation 263–6; breakdown of Byzantine Empire 263–4; coup 1843 274; coup 1862 274; decline of piracy 274; development of legal system 273; dissolution of irregular militias 272; establishment of security forces 272; guerrillas 264–6; interregnum 274–5; merchant class 264; military and gendarmerie battalions 270–1; military reform 275–6; piracy during Ottoman occupation 266–7; political culture 268; role in sea-trade 266–7; social role of irregular forces 276–7; war for liberation 267–9 Greek Association of Cigarette Makers 245 Greek Association of Cigarette Workers 249 Greek Chamber of Commerce 254 guerrillas, Greece 264–6 Guha, Ranajit 2 guilds 29, 71, 73–4, 78, 83–4, 215 Gurney J. 54 Gypsies 12, 14; banishment 191–2; complaints about 178–9, 182, 192;

Hamas 297–8, 299–300, 307 Hanafi legal tradition 35, 36, 206 Hasan Pasha, Abaza 30 hijab 51 historians: problems of studying premodern cultures 26; view of crowds 25–6 historical records, elitism 26 historiography 69, 285, 308 history from below 2, 4, 5 hizbullahis 97, 100 Hobsbawm, Eric 1, 69 House of Labor (Tehran) 104–5, 106 hunger strike, Tehran 97–8 Husaynid dynasty 217–18 Ibrahim, Karbalai 161 income, communal division 73–4 industrial action, Egypt 243 Interior Ministry, Egypt 82 International Association of Cooperation for the Improvement of the Working Classes (IAC) 244 International Federation of Resistance 244 International Mutual Aid Association of Shoemakers 245 International Reading Room (Cairo) 251 International Resistance Federation 243 International Union of Cigarette Workers 248–9

315

INDEX

International Union of the Workers of the Matossian Factory 248–9 International Union of Tobacco Workers 247 International Union of Workers and Employees 242–3 international unions, Egypt 242–3 internationalist discourse, Egyptian labour movement 251–5 intifada, 1987 291–3 intifada, 2000 (al-Aqsa) 18, 300–7 Iran: attacks on protesters 107–8; Constitutional Revolution, 1906 50; demise of workers’ protests 107–10; effects of protests 110–11; escalation of collective action 98–102; fund-raising 103; improved employment situation 108–9; Islamization 93; job-creation 109; land seizures 165; literacy 52; loans for unemployed 96–8, 109; modernization 91; negotiations by unemployed 104; organization of protest 103–7; pasdaran 91, 93, 95, 98, 99, 100, 104, 106, 107; political motives for protest 108; position of women 51–3; protest mobilisers 105–7; Qajar 51; Revolution, 1979 50; support networks 109–10; traditional elements in protests 102–3; variety of street protests 102–3; women’s role in politics 61; workers’ take-overs 109; see also Iranian Revolution, 1979; Pahlavi Iran Iranian Revolution, 1979: history and process 91–4; radical left 93; unemployment 94–5; women’s demonstrations 50; see also Iran Isfahan 56, 57, 100 ishghal (occupation) 102 Islam, and slavery 203–4 Israel 288, 291 Istanbul, Gypsies 182, 191 Italian Workers’ Society 241 Italian–Tunisian treaty, 1868 216 Jalal, Sayyid 161 janissaries 30–1, 42, 224 Jordan 287, 288–90 judges 35–7 Kafr Akhsha 77 kalantars, 1929 tribal rebellion 157

Kalliarekos, Vasilios 252 Kannan, Ibn 43 kanuns 177, 189–90 kapetanios (bandit leaders) 265 Kapodistrias, Ioannis 269–71 kapoi (bodyguards) 265–6 Karagöz (Shadow Theatre) 178, 179 kariani shantytown dweller 116, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 131, 134 karien see shantytowns Karpat, Kemal 186 Kazemi, Farhad 143 Kermanshah 101, 106 Khamsah 1929 tribal rebellion 157 Khan, Haydar 161 Khan al-Akrad 29 khans, relationship with nomads 154–5 Khomeini, Ruhollah, Ayatollah 92 Khorramabad 99 Khouri-Dagher, Nadia 118 khushnishin (agricultural labourers) 150–1 Kiel, Machiel 189 Kirili, complaints about Gypsies 179 Kirman, peasants’ protest 150–1, 164 klephts (brigands) 264–6 Kurdistan 100, 107 La Marsa 222 La Tribuna Libera 249 labour commodification 71 labour migration 214 labour press 249–50 land reform 163, 165 land seizures 165 landlords 146–8 law, as resistance 161–2, 176 Le Bon, Gustave 25 Lebanon, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 289–90 legitimacy: of crowd violence 40–1; of deviance 124; of electricity fraud 121–5; of space 116 Legrain, Jean-François 298 liberalization, economic 134 liva-i çingane (sub-province of the Gypsies) 185–7, 192–3 local elections 77–84 local knowledge 27 L’Operaio 249 L’Unione 250, 253 lutis 57 Lydec 118–21, 124–7

316

INDEX

Ottoman Empire, classical period 174–5 Ottoman period, Damascus 27, 35–40 Ottomanization 44

Macheros, Panos (also Yiannopoulos) 244 Mahabad 100 Majd, Mohammad Gholi 143–4 Maltese immigrants 221 Mamluk period, protest 32–5 Manual Trade Workers’ Union 253–4 marginality 173–6, 181–5 marketplace, role in protests 29, 32 marriage 51 Marushiakova, Elena 175, 180, 182–3 Marvin, Simon 117 Marx, Karl 284 Massad, Joseph 287, 308 May Day, protest 101 May Day Coordination Council 101 measurers 76, 79 metalsmithing, Gypsies 183 migrant labour 14–15 migration 153–4 military, exclusion of Gypsies 188 millet (confessional community) 185–7, 193 mixed unions, Egypt 242–3 modernization 91, 240–1 Morocco 3, 116 Mounsey, Augustus 51, 52, 53, 62–3n Mount Qasyun 28 Muhammad Riza Shah 165 mühimme registers 177, 182, 183 muhtasib (market inspector) 36 mujtahids 57 Nablus 305 nakba 288 narrative sources 178 Nashil district 80, 85 Nasir al-Din Shah 60 National Party (Egypt) 253–4 nationalism 4–5 nationalism, colonial 286 nationalists, Egypt 253–4 network theory 214 nomads, attitude to khans 154–5 offstage dissent 3 opium monopoly 159 oral tradition 178 Organization of Unemployed and Seasonal Workers 95 orientalism 4 Oslo negotiations 306 Otto I, King of Greece 271–5

Pahlavi Iran 296; agrarian structure 144–5; archival research 142; Bakhtiyari peasant protest (Chahar Mahal) 147–51, 153, 154, 164; banditry 158–61; Chahar Mahal movement (Bakhtiyari peasants) 147–51, 153, 154, 164; Civil Code 145; conscripton 160; corruption 162; difficulty of rural research 142; diffusion of ideas 152; disarmament 162–3; hostility to modernization 146; khans’ relationship with nomads 154–5; khushnishin (agricultural labourers) 150–1; Kirman protest 150–1; land reform 163, 165; land registration 146–7; law as resistance 161–2; Majlis 145; migration 153–4; modernization 141–2, 145, 157, 163; nature of rural protest 143; nomadic uprisings 164–5; opium monopoly 159; petitions 162; position of landlords 146–8; proletarianization 153–4; property rights 145, 146; role of press 152; rural ideology and consciousness 151–2; rural population 141–2, 147–8, 163–5; shabnamahs (night letters) 152–3; sharecroppers 141, 144, 147–51, 164; Sitarah-i Bakhtiyari (Bakhtiyari Star) 152; smuggling 161; tribal rebellion 1929, 156–8; see also Iran; Reza Shah Pahlavi Palestine: 1987 intifada 291–3; 2000 intifada (al-Aqsa) 300–7; accountability of leadership 301; background to al-Aqsa intifada 288–91; class stratification 302; collaboration 3; colonialization 286; corruption 296; day labourers 290–1, 292; democracy 296; elites 296; historiography 285; internal conflict 305; interpretations of 2000 intifada 302; nakba 288; Oslo negotiations 293–300; Participatory Poverty Assessment 304–5; popular organizations 303, 308; popular protest 307–8; proletariat 290–2; revolt, 1936–9 288; self-organization 304, 307; society under Palestine Authority 295

317

INDEX

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 287, 289; exile inTunis 293, 294; Lebanon 289–90; marginalization 301; relations with Hamas 299; return to Palestine 295–7 Palestinian Authority (PA) 288, 294–7, 299, 301, 303, 305, 306, 308 Palestinian Legislative Council 297, 306 Palestinian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation 304–5 Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) 297 Palestinian Revolutionary Movement 288 Parrini, Ugo 248 pasdaran 91, 93, 95, 98, 99, 100, 104, 106, 107 Paspati, Alexander 181 patronage 220–1, 223–4 Paykar Organization 104 peasantry, Egypt 76–7 Pellew, Edward, Lord Exmouth 218–19 Pensiero ed Azione (Thought and Action) 241–2 Peres, Shimon 293, 294 petitions 4, 162, 178–9, 182, 192 Philike Etaireia (Society of Friends) 269 piracy 266–74 Popov, Vesselin 175, 180, 182–3 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 289, 301 popular protests, contemporary accounts 26–7 Port Said 70–3, 78 Port Said and Suez Coal Company 71–2 porters, Alexandria 73–4 poverty 10–11, 215, 227–30 prayer 28, 29, 34 premodern culture, difficulties for historians 26 press, role in Pahlavi Iran 152 prices 38 proletarianization, Pahlavi Iran 153–4 property rights, Pahlavi Iran 145 prostitution, Gypsies 183, 187 protest: aims 42; conservatism 42; as deferential 40–3; legitimacy 43–4; Mamluk period 32–5; as multidimensional 42–3; Ottoman period 35–40; regional diversity 49n; by unemployed 95, 96; see also demonstrations Provincial Councils, Egypt 82 public space, women in 53 punishment, of Gypsies 191–2

qadi (chief judges) 35–7 Qashqai 157, 159 Qum, demonstration 92 Rabin, Yitzhak 293, 295 Raffo, Joseph Marie 220 Raymond, André 30 refugees 227 religion, as legitimation for authority 28 religious practice, role in demonstrations 34 repatriation 224–5, 229 residential areas, Damascus 29–30 restructuring, economic 84 Reza Shah Pahlavi 91–2, 144–6 rites of violence 41 Riza Shah see Reza Shah Pahlavi Roma see Gypsies Rudé, George 25, 27 rural populations 10–11, 142, 143 Said, Edward 284, 300–1 Saliba, Angelo 224–5 Sanandaj 100–1 Sayigh, Rosemary 288 Scott, J.C. 3 self-protection 85 Selim I, Sultan 28 shabnamahs (night letters) 152–3 Shanab, Abu, grain fraud 74–5 shantytowns: disconnection campaigns 124–7, 133; discourse on rights 121–5; Egypt 118; elected representatives 132–4; electricity charges 130–1; electricity fraud 118, 119–20; electrification 117–21; electrification as political mechanism 134; hostility to Lydec 125–7; infra-legal status 117–18, 119; legalization of electricity supply 131–2; Lydec 118–21; Morocco 116; oumanâ (representatives) 131–2; political context of electrification 132–3; professionalization of electricity piracy 127–31; state tolerance 118 sharecroppers, Pahlavi Iran 141, 144, 147–51, 164 shari‘a 51–2 Sharon, Ariel 303 Sherkat-i Vahid 96 Shiraz 55–7 shops, closure 29, 37 Sidqi, Muhammad 245

318

INDEX

silk weavers 29 Sitarah-i Bakhtiyari (Bakhtiyari Star) 152 slave women, historical sources 201 slavery 53; abolition of African slavery in Tunis 219; Algiers 201–3; Tunis 218 slaves 12–14; access to property after emancipation 205–6; black 13, 201–3; charitable endowment 205–6; Christian 218; community 204; emancipation 203–5; employment following manumission 219; identity 203; within Islam 203–4; manumission of Christian 218–19; marriage after emancipation 205–6; occupations after emancipation 204; prices 202–3; social position after emancipation 204–5; and social status 202; white 202–3 smuggling 161 social historians, view of crowds 26 society, relationship with law 176 soldiers, as focus of protest 33 south Asia, critique of nationalism 4 South Asian Subaltern Studies 1 space, legitimacy 116 space, management by authorities 119 splintering urbanism 117 stereotyping, Gypsies 184–5 strike breakers 248 subaltern groups: activism 3–4; agency 1; definition 2; independence struggles 16–18; marginalization 1–3; self-protection 8–10; social protest 2 subaltern studies 2; complexity 69–70; marginalization 4; problems of scholarship 5; scope 18 Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) 284, 286 Sufis 28 Surkhi, Mahdi 159 Syndicate of Project/Seasonal Workers of Abadan (SPWA) 105 Syndicate of Unemployed Project Workers of Abadan (SUPWA) 95, 99 Tabriz 92, 100 tagmata (military/gendarmerie) 270–1 tahassun (sit-ins) 102, 113–14n tahlila 28 tax collectors, as focus of protest 33 taxation 38, 53, 188–90, 193 ta‘ziyya plays 58–61, 65–6n Tehran: campaigns by unemployed 96–101; House of Labor 104–5, 106;

hunger strike 97–8; US embassy seizure 107; women’s demonstrations 55 Temple, Lady, visit to Bardo 222 The Union (cigarette workers) 245–8 Thompson, E.P. 1, 7–8, 41 Tilley, Charles 40 trade, regulation 38 tribal rebellion, 1929 156–8 Trikoupis, Charilaos 276 Tudeh party 93 Tulun, Ibn 32, 43 Tunis see Tunisia Tunisia: abolition of African slavery 219; Algerian refugees 227; Bardo 217–18; charity 228; concessions to European investors 215; consular missions 223–4, 229; disputes over employees 225–6; domestic service outside court 223–7; elite domestic service 216–23; employment of former slaves 219; European population 214; Europeans as employers 224; governesses 226–7; growth of hospitality industry 225; guilds 215; Husaynid dynasty 217–18; infrastructure projects 216; labour migration 214; Maltese immigrants 221; manumission of African slaves 219; manumission of Christian slaves 218–19; migrant labour 223–4; palace servants 220; patronage 220–1; poverty amongst Europeans 227; property rights 215–16; repatriation 224–5, 229; sleeping Neapolitans 213; social networks 230–1; treatment of servants 213, 220 ulama 26 Umayyad Mosque 28, 31, 32, 33–4, 37 ‘umdas 82–3, 90 n.65 Unemployed Workers of Ahwaz and Vicinity 99 unemployment, Iranian Revolution 94–5 union leadership, Egypt 243–5 Union of Greek Workers 248 Union of the Unemployed 101 Union of the Unemployed Workers of Isfahan and Vicinity (UUWIV) 100, 104 Union of Unemployed People of Kermanshah 106 Union of Workers and High School Graduates 99 unions, widening participation 248

319

INDEX

United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) 292 UPL see Free Popular University urbanization, Morocco 116 values, community 40–1 Vassilike Phalanga (Royal Phalanx) 272 veiling 51, 54 vigilantism 40–1 waqf (charitable endowment) 205–6 war for liberation (Greece 1821–7) 267–9 Watson, Robert 52 Weber, Eugen 5 weighers and measurers, Egypt 74–6 West Bank 288 wet-nurses 223 Wick, Alexis 284–5 Wills, Charles 52, 62n

women: as bandits and pirates 271; bread riots 55–6; dramatic role in politics 54; education 52; emancipated slaves 12, 200–7; employment in Tunis 215; as focus of study 200; Iranian Revolution, 1979 93; legal rights 52; marriage 51; non-domestic work 52–3; portrayed in ta‘ziyya plays 59; and public space 53; riots 54–8; role in Iranian politics 61; in rural Iranian society 62n; Shiraz demonstration, 1865 55; as slaves in Tunis 221–3; social status and behavior 54; taxation 53; Tehran demonstrations 55; veiling 51, 54 women’s demonstrations 50–1, 58–61 work, social significance 214 Zemon Davis, Natalie 41 Ziegler, Jean 304 Zionism 285

320