Chapter 2: Circumstances of Late Nineteenth Century Egypt

The objective of this chapter is to highlight the historical context within which the Occidental discourses analyzed by this study emerged. To achieve this goal, I will start with a quick introduction to the history of Islamic Egypt. I will focus on the period since the middle of the thirteenth century, which witnessed the beginning of the decline of the Arab Middle East. Then I will focus in the rest of the chapter on describing the political, economic, and ideological conditions of nineteenth century Egypt. I will show how Egyptians felt at the beginning of the nineteenth century a strong need to reform their country, how they tried to achieve reform and development throughout the century, and how they failed, by the end of the century, in achieving this goal.

The study argues that these circumstances greatly influenced the Occidental views of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Qasim Amin, and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi in several ways. These conditions kept the three writers occupied with reform as their main priority. They led the three intellectuals to see the West ambivalently, both as a colonizer that was a threat to progress and as a more advanced civilization that could be a model for reform. The same circumstances made it very difficult for the three thinkers to align themselves either with the Muslim governments, who were largely authoritarian, or with the Muslim masses, who were politically oppressed, economically impoverished, and culturally conservative.

1) Egypt under the Mamlukes

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Egypt was simultaneously governed by two forces, the Mamlukes and the Ottomans. The Mamlukes had governed Egypt since the middle of the thirteenth century, which witnessed the fall of the Abbasid Empire, which was the last major Arab Muslim Empire. As the capital of the Abbasid Empire, Baghdad was captured by the Mongols in 1258. Since then many Muslim Empires arose, but none of them was governed by Arabs and had the vast control over the Muslim world that the Abbasids did.

The Mamlukes were Turkish slave soldiers who were imported by successive Muslim caliphs from middle Asia to be trained as loyal soldiers to the caliphs (Goldschmidt 2002:120-122). Eventually the Mamluke soldiers gained increasing powers after their percentage increased in the Muslim militaries, and they were able to build a small empire centered in Egypt. The Mamlukes ruled Egypt from the middle of the thirteenth century until the Ottomans conquered it in 1517.

What was very unique about the Mamluke Empire was its pattern of power succession. The Mamluke soldiers were divided into numerous fractions. Every group was controlled by an amir (leader/ prince). After the death of each Mamluke sultan, his son would succeed him for a brief period of time, during which the Mamluke princes would fight each other until one of them subjugated the rest and rose to power. This made the Mamluke Empire literally an empire controlled by continuously fighting groups. However, according to Peter Mansfield (1991:23), the continual fighting among the Mamlukes did not prevent them from showing in Egypt “many aspects of an advanced civilization.”

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Mamlukes faced a series of defeats at the hands of a new, rising Muslim empire, the Ottoman. The Ottomans started to rise in the thirteenth century, but they first went west, focusing their attention on invading their Christian neighbors. They invaded the Balkan states and captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. Then they turned their attention toward Asia. During the period from 1502 until 1517, the Ottomans captured Persia, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt and became a Muslim empire. However, contrary to previous Muslim empires, the Ottomans chose a capital, Constantinople, that was far distant from the heartland of Islam, moving the center of Islamic civilization away from the Arab Middle East.

The Ottoman Empire started to decline in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Ottomans started losing land to the rising European colonial powers, and in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire became “the sick man of Europe” (Mansfield 1991:35-45). The decline of the Ottoman Empire had many manifestations.

Economically, European countries controlled the sea, trade, and trade routes. They developed new industries and flooded the markets of the Muslim countries with manufactured products and in return bought cheaper raw materials. They used a system of “capitulations” to freely live, move, and trade in the Muslim countries in return for very low taxes, if any. According to Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:139), the practice of issuing “capitulations” goes back to previous Muslim empires, which signed agreements to exempt Muslims who lived in non-Muslim countries from being subjugated to the laws of those countries. In return, foreign citizens living in the Muslim empires received the same treatment. The Ottomans encouraged those agreements when they were the world’s superior power. Yet, when the Ottomans declined, those agreements had negative effects. The “capitulations” freed the European merchants from paying local taxes to the Muslim countries where they lived, traded, and prospered.

In addition, according to Peter Mansfield (1991:28), the Ottoman Empire was “a highly centralized” one, where “virtually all land within the Empire belonged to the Ottoman state,” which prevented the rise of private ownership or of a “feudal nobility” that could balance the power of the sultan. The centralization of power in the Ottoman Empire was more apparent at the political level. Many Muslim countries, under Ottoman rule, were governed by Turkish or other foreign rulers, who were appointed by the sultan, and the masses lacked any political power or experience.

At the international level, European countries used various justifications to intervene in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire and to control some Muslim countries and ports. France and Russia intervened to protect the Christian religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Spain, Portugal and the British fought with each other over the control of important Muslim sea ports in the Gulf and India. And many Europeans were appointed by the Ottoman sultans and governors to high administrative posts to help reform the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim countries.

At the ideological and cultural levels, the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim countries went through numerous and continuous attempts at reform by introducing Western-style educational, administrative, and legal systems.

In Egypt, after defeating the Mamlukes in 1517, the Ottomans kept on sending Ottoman rulers for Egypt, but in reality they left most of the actual authority in the hands of the Mamlukes and their princes. According to William Cleveland (2000:65), Egypt “by the late eighteenth century had become in reality if not in name an autonomous state under a revived Mamluk order.” What happened was that the Ottoman governors of Egypt delegated too many administrative and financial authorities to the Mamluke amirs. Every Mamluke prince controlled some troops and a piece of land; from its peasants he collected high taxes. From time to time, one Mamluke prince was able to attract sufficient troops and wealth to subjugate the rest of the competing Mamluke factions under his control for a short period of time. But eventually the strong prince would be weakened and defeated due to the continuous fighting among the Mamlukes. As a result, the Mamluke regime weakened the central government and created a huge power vacuum, the Egyptians were squeezed for taxes, and the Mamluke regime was “unstable, oppressive, and unpopular.”

2) Conditions of Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Egypt made the fastest and most dramatic transformation of any Middle Eastern country in the nineteenth century. (Goldschmidt 2002:161)

At the end of the eighteenth century, Egypt was miserably governed by competing Mamluke factions. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Egypt was invaded by France, threw off its invaders, then rose militarily and economically to become a regional Muslim power that would threaten Constantinople itself. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century Egypt’s power declined again, and in 1882 Egypt fell under British occupation. The major transformations through which Egyptian society went during the nineteenth century uniquely shaped Egyptians’ life at all levels. In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the effects of those dramatic changes on three main levels: the political, the economic, and the ideological.

1. Political Life

The French Invasion of Egypt. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte led a French military expedition to successfully invade Egypt, aiming to expand the French Empire and to weaken its main rival, the British, by controlling the trade route to one of Britain’s main colonies, India. Bonaparte easily defeated the Mamlukes and occupied Egypt, forming what Peter Mansfield (1991:43) called “the first non-Muslim invasion of the heartland of Islam.” In three years, the Ottomans, helped by the British, were able to expel the French. According to Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:163), the French expedition, although unsuccessful, shaped Egypt’s future in three important ways. First, the French occupation of Egypt alerted the other European powers, especially Britain, to Egypt’s strategic “geographical position at the hinge of the Asian and African Continents, guarding the principal route to India and the East” (Mansfield 1991:43). Second, the French occupation of Egypt demonstrated to Muslims beyond a doubt their decline and weakness and destroyed their wrong conviction of the superiority of the Ottoman Empire over Europe. Third, Bonaparte defeated the Mamlukes and created a huge power vacuum that they could not fill any more.

Mohamed Ali’s Dynasty. After the French left, Egypt spent several years in chaos until it was stabilized again under the rule of a tough but politically brilliant leader, Mohamed Ali, who would create modern Egypt and whose family would rule Egypt till 1952. An ethnic Albanian born in Macedonia, Mohamed Ali was sent to Egypt by the Ottoman sultan at the head (second in command) of an Albanian force to stabilize Egypt after the French had left. By 1805, Mohamed Ali was able to defeat the Mamlukes and rise to power. During his rule, which extended till 1848, Mohamed Ali transformed Egypt into a regional military and economic power. He stabilized the country and ended corruption, used European experts to modernize the irrigation system, introduced new crops (especially long-staple cotton), built new factories and protected them by imposing heavy tariffs against imports, and sent hundreds of Egyptians to Europe for education. As a result, Egyptian peasants were able to raise three crops a year in fields that used to produce just one crop, an estimated one million new acres of land were cultivated, and about 40,000 Egyptians were employed in industrial enterprises. In addition, Mohamed Ali was able to create a huge military, which he used to extend his rule over Sudan and Syria and to help the Ottoman Empire defeat its enemies. By the end of the 1830s, Egypt became a regional power that was feared by the Ottoman Empire itself (Mansfield 1991:49, Goldschmidt 2002:163, Cleveland 2000:66-70).

At the end of the 1830s, Europe united with the Ottoman Empire to put an end to Mohamed Ali’s ambitions. The European nations did not like Mohamed Ali’s rising power for several reasons. First, they “preferred that a weakened Ottoman Empire should survive rather than be dismantled and swallowed by one of its rivals” (Mansfield 1991:56). Second, Britain in particular had growing political and economic interests in the Ottoman Empire. “In the 1830s,” Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:154) explained, “Britain decided that the Ottoman Empire would be the best guardian of its routes to India and soon committed itself to the Empire’s defense, signed trade treaties with the Ottomans, and by 1850 the Ottomans had become the leading customer of British manufactures and a major supplier of foodstuffs and raw materials to Britain.”

In 1838 the British signed a treaty with the Ottoman sultan that gave Britain and the other European powers the right to trade throughout the Ottoman Empire in return for a tariff of only three per cent. Enforcing this treaty on Egypt meant the destruction of its fragile industries, which were protected by heavy tariffs. When Mohamed Ali refused to accept the treaty, Britain led an international coalition that included France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia to force a humiliating treaty on Mohamed Ali. The European powers forced Mohamed Ali to withdraw his troops from Syria, to reduce his military from 250,000 to 18,000 soldiers, and to open Egypt’s economy and market to European products and traders. As a result, the European powers allied with the Ottoman sultan ended Mohamed Ali’s ambitions (Toledano 1990:1-2).

Mohamed Ali was succeeded by his son Ibrahim in 1848, and then by a line of grandsons, Abbas (ruled 1848-1854), Said (1854-1863), Ismail (1863-1879), Tawfik (1879-1892), and Abbas Helmi (1892-1914). “Mehmet [Mohamed] Ali cast a giant shadow over the fortunes of his successors. His image loomed larger than life,” noted Toledano (1990:6).

Egypt after Mohamed Ali. Mohamed Ali left his successors with “a cohesive semi-independent state” (Mansfiled 1990:85). But, he also left them with many growing problems, such as the opening of Egypt to European trade and economic pressure, the reduction of Egypt’s military power and its ability to defend itself, and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the Egyptian masses as land and wealth were concentrated in the hands of a small elite.

Both Said and Ismail tried to implement ambitious modernization programs for Egypt. Those programs included digging new canals, repairing dams, expanding both railways and streamer transport on the Nile, and building bridges and lighthouses. According to Peter Mansfield (1990:88), “the [Egyptian] cultivated area was extended by some 15 per cent and between 1862 and 1879 the value of exports and imports nearly tripled.” More importantly, Said started the digging of the Suez Canal and Ismail completed it. Those projects required a lot of money. When Egypt’s budget could not finance those huge projects, Said and Ismail resorted to an unfortunate and dangerous source of money: they took loans with high interest from European financial institutions.

In April 1876, Egypt announced bankruptcy. Soon after, the British imposed financial control over Egypt to guarantee the rights of their bond-holders. Then France sent a financial mission to Egypt. A Nile flood and cotton pest caused Egypt more financial damages. The British and the French found that Egypt’s financial crisis was partly caused by Ismail’s unlimited authority and uncalculated policies. Therefore they pressure Ismail to delegate more authority to his ministers. In response, Ismail selected a cabinet that included a British minister of finance and a French minister of public works.

A series of confrontations between Ismail and the Europeans on one side and between Ismail and his military on another front, led to the removal of Ismail in 1879. According to Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:179), “when Ismail turned over the Khedivate to his son, Tawfik, and left Egypt in July 1879, the state debt stood at 93 million Egyptian pounds. It had been 3 million when he came to power in 1863.”

Tawfik inherited Egypt’s debt in addition to an unstable situation. Domestically, three main Egyptian elite groups pressured Tawfik to open the country for political reform and constitutional governance. The first was a group of religious reformers led by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his disciples, who called for religious and political reform. The second group was the Egyptian officers in the Egyptian military. After being neglected and denied higher positions in the military for decades, some Egyptian officers reached higher ranks in the military and wanted to prove their capabilities and to acquire more power. At the end of the 1870s, the Egyptian soldiers united behind an Egyptian colonel named Ahmed Orabi, who led them to revolt against Ismail and Tawfik and to fight the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 before being defeated and exiled. The third group consisted of civil servants, land-owners, and other notables who favored political reform. Many of them were part of the Turkish elite but identified themselves with the aspirations of the Egyptian people. However, this third group was not friendly to the masses. They supported reform to some extent, but they despised public uprisings and mass revolutions. The three groups together formed a front at the end of the 1870s that led the national demand for reform and national opposition to Europe’s intervention in Egypt’s affairs.

Egypt under the British Occupation. A series of clashes between Orabi and Tawfik led to the military intervention of the British in the summer of 1882 to protect the interests of their bond-holders in Egypt’s economy. Orabi led thousands of Egyptians in a bloody resistance against the British incursion. The public uprising worried the rich members of the Egyptian national front. The national movement therefore divided, Orbai was defeated, and the British occupied Egypt.

After the British entered Egypt, they restored the authority of Tawfik, but, in reality they controlled and ran the country. According to Peter Mansfield (1990:97), Egypt became “the most important link in Britain’s imperial system,” and the British officials responsible for the relationship between Egypt and Britain became the real rulers of Egypt. One of those officials, Evelyn Baring (know later as Lord Cromer), became the effective ruler of Egypt from 1883 to 1907.

Cromer set a tough financial control system over Egypt’s budget to help pay Ismail’s debt. Paying the debts absorbed more than half of Egypt’s revenues. Cromer also limited the expenditures of the government on public works, especially on education. When Cromer retired in 1907, about 1.5 per cent of Egypt’s population was receiving primary education as compared with 1.7 per cent in 1873, and the rest remained illiterate. Cromer did not believe in Egyptians’ ability to occupy high administrative posts. Rather, he counted on highly paid foreign administrative experts. Therefore, the number of Egyptians in the higher civil service posts declined. Yet, Cromer kept improving Egypt’s irrigation system, and by the 1890s the Egyptian economy showed some signs of recovery.

When Tawfik died in 1892 he was succeeded by his son Abbas Hilmi, who constituted a major challenge to the British. Abbas Hilmi supported the growing Egyptian national movement led by Western-educated Egyptian nationalists, such as Mustafa Kamel. The movement could be seen as an extension of the national movement that mobilized Egypt at the end of the 1870s. However, the new movement was supported by new factors, such as an increasing number of Western-educated Egyptians and a more open political system under the British occupation, which supported freedom of the press.

2. Economic Life and Social Classes

According to Charles Issawi (1993:177-190), during the nineteenth century Egypt witnessed an economic boom at many levels. The Egyptian population rose from 3 million in 1800 to about 10 million at the end of the nineteenth century. Total world investment in Egypt reached in 1914 about 200 million British pounds (the largest in the Middle East), of which 94 million pounds were public debt and the rest were investments in the private sector. Because of the Suez Canal, Egypt’s location, and the growth of steamship navigation, Egypt’s ports were main centers for international navigations, and domestic transportation improved dramatically. “In the late 1830s,” Issawi noted (1993:181), “Britian, France, and Austrian steam navigation provided regular services to Egypt, Syria, and Turkey.” Domestically, by 1913 total railway track in Egypt was 4,300 kilometers compared to 3,500 in the Ottoman Empire. Total trade in Egypt was higher than the world average. The cultivated land was tremendously expanded, and a small industrial base was established during Mohamed Ali’s regime. These improvements resulted from two main factors: the integration of Egypt into the world economy and the efforts of Mohamed Ali and his grandsons.

Unequal Distribution of Wealth. Although those changes may have improved the level of living of the regular Egyptian during some periods, generally the level of living of the masses did not improve, and a huge gap separated the masses from the elite (Issawi 1993:177). This was due to several reasons. First, Egypt’s Turkish rulers counted on foreign elites (Turkish or European) in developing and running the country. Therefore, the fruits of any achieved progress went to the leading foreign elites and were hardly shared with the general public. Second, few public projects, such as education and health care, had a direct effect on the level of living of regular Egyptians. Unfortunately, those projects did not get enough attention from the rulers. Most of the investment went to improving the economy and the irrigation system, which mainly benefited the ruling class and the land-owners. Third, the lack of political institutions and constitutional rule hindered the rise of an Egyptian middle class that was capable of forcing the elites to share the fruits of development with the rest of society (Issawi 1993:188-190).

Class Relations. Egypt’s economic conditions were clearly reflected in the class structure of Egyptian society. According to Roger Owen (1993:111-123), Egyptian society at the end of the nineteenth century was divided into two main groups, the elites and the masses. The elites consisted of four sub-groups. The first sub-group was the Turkish governing elite, which was gradually integrated into Egyptian society, due to intermarriage and Arabacization; but it also controlled the government and the bureaucracy and owned vast properties. The second sub-group was the Europeans who came to Egypt to work in trade, in the bureaucracy, or with the British occupation. According to Roger Owen (1993:117), the number of Europeans living in Egypt rose from about 10,000 in 1838 to over 90,000 in 1881. The third sub-group was the Egyptian land-owners, many of them part of the royal family, notables, former high military officers, or former top bureaucrats. The fourth sub-group was the civil servants and bureaucrats. This group included an increasing number of Egyptians, especially those educated in Europe or in Western-style Egyptian educational institutions. On the other side, the masses consisted of the rest of the Egyptian population, many of them peasants and a few craftsmen and small traders in the cities.

According to Ehud Toledano (1990) and Amira Sonbol (2000), the division between the Egyptian elites and masses was strongly enforced and supported by a series of cultural norms and practices. The elites adopted a foreign culture (Turkish and then European languages) to separate themselves from the masses. The Egyptian masses (Muslims and Copts) kept their own Arabic-Egyptian culture that was “rooted in the Egyptian locale, replete with themes and images of both villages and city life in the Nile valley” (Toledano 1990:16-17).

Egyptians had to acquire the elites’ culture (Turkish or European) in order to climb up the social and class ladder. This meant joining Western-style educational institutions, being educated in Europe, and interacting with Europeans on a regular basis. According to Ehud Toledano (1990:19), “only a minority among members of the [Egyptian] lower strata had access to any of these [qualifications].” On the other side, the Egyptian culture and way of live affected many of the elite (especially Turks) who gradually learned Arabic, married Egyptians, and considered themselves Egyptian.

“Members of the royal family and the upper classes who spoke Arabic preferred to use French as the language of prestige and sophistication. Their families, particularly the women, were taught French rather than Arabic, which was a way of keeping the classes distinct one from the other. …using a foreign language in preference to Arabic mirrored a social structure in which a foreign elite and its indigenous allies were dominant.” (Amira Sonbol 2000:216)

3. Ideological life

Egypt was the most Westernized country in the nineteenth-century middle east. (Arthur Goldschmidt 2002:177)

At least three main ideologies dominated Egypt’s ideological life at the end of the nineteenth century; Islamic nationalism (pan-Islamism), Arab nationalism (pan-Arabism), and Egyptian nationalism. I will offer in the following paragraphs a short introduction to each of them.

Pan-Islamism. Islamic nationalists, such as Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abduh (1849-1905), sought to unite all Muslims under one Islamic state (caliphate), over which a righteous Muslim ruler (a caliph) would preside. They also sought to reform the Muslim masses’ understanding of Islam, to encourage them to improve their lives and to revolt against the incursions of European colonialism (Adams 2000:13).

What was unique about the pan-Islamic thinkers was that they adopted a critical approach toward the way religion was studied and taught at their time. They were addressing masses that were far from being Westernized. Therefore, they focused their attention on bridging the gap between the religious masses and the Westernized elites by trying to rationalize Muslims’ understanding of Islam and make it compatible with modernity. They clashed with the orthodox religious institutions and adopted an open approach toward the West. They praised European civilization, affirmed the validity of science and of scientific knowledge, and favored constitutional and democratic reform (Esposito 1995, Keddie 1968:XVII & XVIII).

Arab Nationalism. Arab nationalists saw Arabs, within the Muslim world, as a distinct nation that deserved to be united in one Arab state under an Arab government. According to Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:195), “Arab identity played no great part in Middle East politics up to the twentieth century.” For most of the nineteenth century, Arabs felt loyal to the Islamic empire (the Ottomans). However, a series of important events led to the rise of anti-Turkish attitudes in the Arab world.

First, the Ottomans moved the center of the Islamic civilization for the first time since the rise of Islam away from the Arab world by adopting Constantinople as their capital. In addition, the Ottomans, as al-Afghani said (Imarah 1981:13), were “not good colonizers.” The conditions of the Arab world deteriorated tremendously under the rule of the Ottomans, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Second, in the middle of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire, seeking to reform itself, adopted a series of reforms called Tanzimat, which included introducing new legal codes and opening Western-style educational institutions. One result of these reforms was the rise of a young Ottoman generation that was more interested in reform and in Turkish nationalism. The young Turkish nationalists angered the Arabs and motivated them to develop their own nationalism.

In addition, Arab nationalism, according to Arthur Goldschmidt (2002:195) spread more rapidly among Christian Arabs, who “were less likely to feel strong loyalty to the Ottoman Empire” and were more influenced by European liberal and nationalistic thought. Arab Christians were also more influenced by some schools built by American missionaries in Lebanon and Syria. Arab Muslims hesitated at the beginning to send their children to be educated at the American schools. Therefore, Arab Christians constituted the majority of the students of those schools, which were very influential in spreading liberal and nationalistic ideas. Eventually, Arab nationalism spread among Muslim nationalists, such as Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, who represented “the first example of a truly Muslim strain within Arab nationalism” (2002:197).

Egyptian Nationalism. Egyptian nationalists saw Egypt as a separate state within the Arab and Muslim worlds. They also called for an Egyptian government that truly represented the Egyptian people and culture.

The rise of Egyptian nationalism was a result of several factors. First, as explained before, since the sixteenth century Egypt was dominated by small non-native elites (Turks and then Europeans) that kept themselves culturally separate from native-born Egyptians, who were called fellahin (peasants). Second, a small number of Egyptians were able through time to acquire higher education, join the military and the bureaucracy, and climb the social ladder. Third, Egypt’s rulers, especially after the British occupation, used Egyptian nationalists and the Egyptian national movement as a tool against the British. Fourth, new transportation projects, such as railways and telegraph lines, brought Egyptians closer and helped spread feelings of unity and nationalism. As a result of the previous factors, a growing Egyptian nationalistic movement grew. It included Egyptian soldiers, bureaucrats, and scholars. It also included some landowners, and some Europeans and Turks who identified themselves with the ambitions of the Egyptian people.

However, it seems that the leaders of the national movement could not overcome the gap that separated the Egyptian elite, to which they belonged, from the Egyptian masses. For example, the leaders of the national movement such, as Moustafa Kamel and Qasim Amin, were French-educated lawyers who were part of the Egyptian elite. They were not real representatives of the poor Egyptian peasants.

Ideological Duality. It is important to note that the three ideological movements outlined above were inter-linked. For example, al-Afghani, the founder of the Islamic revival movement, was seen as one of the founders of the Egyptian national movement, although al-Afghani himself was not an Egyptian. In addition, an Arab nationalist, such as al-Kawakibi, and an Egyptian nationalist, such as Qasim Amin, had a great respect for Islamic teachings and civilization and for Islamic nationalism in general.

In addition, ideological movements in Egypt were marked throughout the nineteenth century by an institutional and cultural duality. This was because the need for learning from the more advanced West forced Egypt’s rulers to adopt many European-style institutions (educational, industrial, judicial, etc.), while access to those institutions was limited to a very small minority of the Egyptian people. This duality influenced all aspects of Egyptian life and divided the society into two main groups, a small Westernized elite and a vast traditional lower class (Cleveland 2000:100).

3) Conclusion

The nineteenth century changed Egypt. At the beginning of the century, Egyptians in particular and Muslims in general came to realize the inferiority of their countries to the European countries. During the first four decades of the century, Mohamed Ali transformed Egypt to become a regional economic and political power. Yet, after several European nations united with the Ottoman Empire to defeat Mohamed Ali at the beginning of the 1840s, Egypt’s conditions deteriorated again. This deterioration led to the occupation of Egypt by the British in 1882.

From these circumstances, four main phenomena important to our thesis emerged.

First, reform and development became one of the main objectives of Egypt, its successive governments, its intellectual leaders, and its people in general.

Second, the West played a dual role, both as an obstacle against and as a model for reform. This is because Europeans forced Egypt to open its markets to their products in an imbalanced economic relationship, allied with the Ottomans to defeat Mohamed Ali, enjoyed special economic and political privileges in Egypt, intervened in running the county politically and economically, and militarily occupied Egypt twice. In addition, foreigners who came to Egypt to trade, to work with the British colonization, or to work as experts and aides for the successive Egyptian governments were part of an elite class that enjoyed special economic and political privileges in Egypt. At the ideological level, the Egyptian higher class used the European languages, education, and style of life to strengthen its control over and separation from the great majority of the Egyptian masses. In other words, Egypt’s rulers and higher classes used their knowledge of European sciences, technologies, and languages to further oppress the Egyptian masses.

On the positive side, successive Egyptian governments looked up to Europe as a model for progress and development. Thus, they sent Egyptian students to learn in Europe, hired European aides and experts to improve their governments, and opened Western-style educational systems. In addition, the struggle between the Egyptian governments and the British colonization after 1882 led the Egyptian governments to empower some segments of the Egyptian national front in order to be able use them as a leverage against the British, who forced the Egyptian governments to open up their political system and to loosen their control over the Egyptian press. This led to an atmosphere of relative freedom at the end of the nineteenth century, praised by later generations’ reformers, such as Qasim Amin and Abd Al-Rahman Al-Kawakibi.

Third, the various attempts to reform Egypt failed in democratizing the Egyptian governments. At the end of the nineteenth century, Egypt was governed by a small group of rulers who were descendents of Mohamed Ali’s family. These rulers, supported by a wider but still small elite, had hegemony over the vast majority of Egypt’s economic resources. They also separated themselves from the Egyptian masses socially and culturally. It may be true that some members of the ruling elite eventually assimilated into Egyptian society and considered themselves to be Egyptians, yet what was clear was that native Egyptians had very little say in running their country compared with the members of this elite.

Egypt’s political elite had a dual approach toward the West. First, they rejected the pressures of the West on them to open their country politically and economically. In this regard, they were willing to empower the Egyptian national front to use it as leverage against the interventions of the West. On the other hand, the Egyptian governments were never willing to share power with the masses. Moreover, successive Egyptian governments were willing to use their knowledge of European culture, languages, and sciences to strengthen their hegemony over the Egyptian masses.

Fourth, reform failed to improve the conditions of the great majority of the Egyptian masses, who were left economically impoverished, illiterate, socially conservative, and politically weak. In this regard, the Egyptian masses were victimized by Western colonialism, by their Muslim regimes, and by their personal weakness and lack of opportunities.

In the next chapters, I will show how these phenomena shaped the Occidental discourses of three influential intellectual leaders, Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, Qasim Amin, and Abd Al-Rahman Al-Kawakbi, who lived in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century.