The Rise Of The Arab Fellah
Basheer, Tahseen M.
Every dawn from the minarets of the Arab World comes the call to prayer: "Come to pray, come to your self-betterment." Of late, the second part of the call, the appeal to self-betterment, is...
...In the early nineteenth century the stage was a citadel and the actor a tobacco merchant from Albania, a man rebuilding Egypt and the neighboring area...
...Egyptians became engineers, army officers, were sent to the centers of learning...
...In the countryside people could not believe that the sun of the monarchy had set...
...It is a universal religion, not the religion of the elite, nor of a chosen people, nor even a particular nation, but of all men and women who are equal before God...
...He could become "His Elevated Highness" or "His Most Prominent Highness" or "His Excellency...
...From Here We Start" This was the title of a book by the young Azhar University graduate, Mohammad Khalid, stating in clear terms that Islam does not prescribe a definite political and social system...
...The British came uninvited and promised to leave as soon as things were well organized for the king...
...Education generates unlimited hopes...
...After sunset in the little villages, when the evenings are dull, the public school teacher or the sheik start to tell the city news, informing the illiterates of the great events that are happening...
...The vicious circle was broken by the army's dethronement of the king in 1952...
...In a country with a long tradition, easy answers are suspect...
...There are no easy ways out...
...Before July 1952, the landlord class, with the help of the king and the British, dominated the political scene...
...Yields per acre did not decrease...
...Hall Napoleon In 1798 the self-contained, isolated society that had fallen into a long sleep dreaming of past glory, was suddenly shocked by a short man coming from the shores of France, ascending the pyramids to tell the Egyptians of a new era, a new revolution and a new trinity...
...he could be a "pasha," a "bey," or an "effendi...
...A movement for creating a national bank to buy and redeem the public debt was gathering strength...
...Gradually under the British, with land reclamation projects and the introduction of a modern system of landownership registration, the heads of many families became landowners in the modern sense...
...Many wealthy Egyptians whose main concern had been the acquisition of land, started joining the ranks of industrial promoters, thereby creating a landlord-industrial class...
...A Citadel and a Tobacco Merchant Egypt has always been a land of wonders...
...Egyptian banks were subsidiaries of British and French Banks...
...After all, God is merciful if you are wrong...
...cooperatives were introduced...
...The promoters of this project pointed out that the only way for underdeveloped oriental countries to grow was through trade and industry, which required large amounts of capital that only banks, drawing on the savings of the public, could provide...
...The rise of this class, and the utilization of nationalism by some Egyptian businesses to seek Government protection, played an increasing role in Egyptian life...
...They were indoctrinated with the same nationalism...
...At times the administrative screws were looser and there was an air of free election...
...There was a parliament elected by the people, but the people had no voice in its deliberations...
...The fellah's son's imagination—with the help of the printing press—spread a new gospel and the people learned of something called democracy, of no taxation without representation, and a great debate went on: who is master of Egypt?—an alien royal family or the people...
...but the false prophet was quickly discovered...
...There seems to be no change, but underneath it all new seeds are gaining roots...
...This idealism transcends differences of class and religion...
...it is not the heritage of a royal family or a piece of property that they can distribute the way they desire...
...While fulfilment of campaign promises never fully materialized, people enjoyed the campaign...
...The size of the cotton crop showed an uninterrupted increase from 3 million bales in 1879 to almost 8 million bales in 1913...
...It included serious businessmen as well as adventurers...
...Senior officers were alien elements of Turkish or Albanian origin, who had no affinity with the people but close association with the palace...
...It gives them a universal outlook and an extra-national brotherhood...
...Yet the students who had survived the strong pressures on their freedom by governments and university administrations lived above partisanship, giving Egypt a sense of direction when the country was falling into confusion...
...It answers not only their worldly problems but their search for the afterlife...
...To Egyptians in the thousands of villages that compose the valley of the Nile there was always a sun and there is always a king...
...It is a melting pot of many nations and many historical experiences...
...Not until 1936 was a new Egyptian army reborn...
...The Ommda (mayor), the school teacher, the country doctor, the sheik, put their heads together to decipher the political puzzles of the world...
...The Egyptian learned that democracy was not an item on the British export list, and this confrontation saw the West suppress the budding of an internal democracy...
...They were the ones who awoke the national consciousness, for in their long summers they would go home to their farms in the country and tell the people about freedom and liberty...
...It does not evoke any dramatic response either from traditional policy makers within or the powers without...
...At first the people resisted, but when he cleaned the streets and beautified Cairo they accepted the cleaning and the beautification...
...The same contrasts existed in political life...
...Coup d'Etat, Movement and Revolution The young officers moved in July 1952 to break the vicious circle, and to the surprise of everyone the all-powerful king gave way under the first blow...
...It was not until the rule of his son Said that private landownership was granted...
...In 1914 the foreign community numbered 150,000 out of a total population of 12,000,000...
...The Egyptians were told that they had no knack for industrial enterprise...
...It was a short but great encounter...
...In less than ten years modern Egypt spread north from the deep provinces of the Sudan up to Turkey...
...As the juggling of political power between these three forces went on in Egypt, the people at large did not know clearly with whom to start: whether to ally themselves with the king and landowners against the British, or vice versa...
...The students gradually became a class of their own...
...The Bourgeoisie Under the British, development in Egypt was carried on by foreign entrepreneurs and financiers with foreign money...
...By 1938 the union that had been achieved on national issues was split along party lines...
...The discrepancy between actions and beliefs leaves a widening ideological vacuum...
...The New Arab From these experiences a new identity is emerging...
...He moved quickly to organize a modern army with a new know-how...
...It is a melting pot and, in a country where national pride was frustrated by the British and the king, it is a school where political ideas are transformed into action...
...In a country where land is the source of life there could be no real revolution unless there was a land revolution...
...they alone are able to challenge...
...Sometimes honest voices of opposition were able to exercise pressure...
...The students became isolated within their own compounds...
...The Moslem idea of man's fate, as judged by the tipping of the good and bad scales, offers a rational leeway...
...The Army Officer With the rise of the Egyptian middle class, Egyptians who had infiltrated the ranks of the army found themselves blocked from promotion beyond the rank of colonel...
...These words have a magic of their own, a magic which cannot be pinned down...
...The business community of Cairo and Alexandria and other cities was a curious mixture of French, British, Maltese, Greeks, Italians, Belgians and stateless...
...Managing through education to go up the social ladder, these officers had behind them the same political experience that the other students did...
...Here I am most concerned with this unromantic, indifferent, little-talked-about people of the Arab world who are fast becoming the strongest single factor in the area...
...The army in 1881 joined forces with the people to limit the power of the khedive, but the British entered Egypt and dispersed the army...
...How was this revolution of the indifferent, the immovable, the unchangeable set in motion...
...Only a few hours before Farouk bade his last farewell to my home town of Alexandria, experts in the leading newspapers of the West were telling us that Farouk was the strongest man in the Middle East...
...The genius of Nasser was that within the army he stopped the formation of "little Nassers...
...Their leadership failed to reach a reasonable compromise between Ideal and practice...
...It is the awakened spirit of millions of fellahin and bedouin who want a solid basis for their society...
...Yet parliaments were not all the same...
...By the policy of a carrot and a stick, with moral suasion and appeals to patriotism, he is leading the country out of the slippery path of a sequence of coups d'etats...
...People with no roots in Egypt came to make a profit and plough it back in their home countries...
...To him, being an "Arab" is the ability to speak the language identified with the hopes and aspirations of the people...
...They shared with other students a disdain for the multiplicity of political parties that do not achieve any national goal...
...Maybe it was a modern version of the Moslem expectation of a mehdi or a "messiah" to cure all ills...
...Six million acres of arable land cannot support two or three million farm families in decency, even if it is very productive and much of it is double cropped...
...In the 1950s 1.5 per cent of the landowners held half of the land, while the other half was divided among the remaining 98.5 per cent of the proprietors...
...Of late, the second part of the call, the appeal to self-betterment, is receiving a great response...
...Gentlemen with Broken Promises In 1881, the people of Egypt, under the leadership of the army, staged a peaceful demonstration telling the khedive that they wanted better representation...
...And then its officer corps came not from the ranks of the privileged but was infused with the sons of poorer classes...
...For they have to provide the teacher to educate the illiterate, the thinker to egg on the complacent, and above all the intellectual elite that will save Egypt from isolation and self-containment and provide a healthy atmosphere of criticism that will always challenge the status quo...
...who believe that within the Arab countries there are enough resources of oil, water and land that can be utilized for the benefit of all the people...
...Trying to imitate the hero, others had staged their own little "revolutions...
...But Egypt needs more and more land in order to remedy the old imbalances in wealth...
...The Land Reform Law plus the land confiscated from the royal family benefited more than one million people...
...This, in turn, gave rise to the phenomenon of absentee landlordism in which the owners dwelt in urban centers or wandered about Europe showing no interest even in expanding their own resources...
...With this new class of landlords, a new class of landless peasants also developed as its counterpart...
...They were able to stage the revolution of 1919 in which every little village in Egypt participated in boycotting the British...
...The new Arab does not believe in race theory...
...Gradually the heavy responsibility now thrust upon Egypt's educated youth was shared by other growing classes...
...When equality was not the essence of his rule, they disliked the man, for they liked equality, and when he could not enter into their hearts and minds, he tried a Moslem cloak...
...Today they are still a tremendous social force...
...The king was interested in keeping his privileged position not only as the sovereign of Egypt but also as one of the richest landlords and business men in the country...
...The army too is a modern western organization...
...The King is as ancient an institution as Egypt itself...
...There was a tremendous increase in the propensity to own land...
...Current thinking about the Arab world has so far been shallow, inconsistent, or romantic...
...For many years the population has grown faster than reclaimed land, thus making a bad situation progressively worse...
...Approximately 200,000 plots of land were given to 200,000 fellahs who, with their families, amounted to one million formerly landless farm workers.* The land inequality which prevailed under previous regimes was partly rectified...
...The people looked upon the parliament as an added imposition by the central government...
...Election time is a homecoming period...
...Only now do they realize the wisdom of what God revealed unto them many centuries ago: "God does not change you unless you change yourself...
...After the British occupation the army was dispersed...
...The cumulative effect was an acute land hunger among the peasantry to whom agriculture is not merely an occupation but a way of life...
...The man was Napoleon, the revolution was the French, and the trinity, "liberte, egalit6 et fraternite...
...But with the high rate of population increase, with the new crop of a thousand babies a day, signs of local peasant revolts began to occur in 1950...
...Above all, he is not a Levantine living as a parasite on foreign powers...
...Other Egyptian promoters came from politics and the civil service, usually after a period of apprenticeship on the boards of foreign companies, where they acquired some knowledge of business administration...
...With the king came the system of titles, putting every Egyptian in a hierarchy of official classification commensurate with royal satisfaction...
...After the recital there are the deliberations...
...Nevertheless, when it comes to practical questions, the young generation uses expediency...
...the ideas of the French Revolution remained...
...Napoleon left...
...EI-Aiyyan": the Landed Aristocracy When Mohammed Ali became the ruler of Egypt, he declared himself sovereign, the sole ruler and owner of the land...
...The huge estates of the royal family were confiscated and rents were fixed by law...
...The son of the fellah, called upon to become a soldier, left the fields for the battlefields...
...Idealistic leadership now degenerated into demagoguery...
...For more than thirty years parliament never passed any law significantly increasing land taxation...
...In a land where the afterlife has been a living force in the minds of Egyptians since the Pharaohs, a sense of transcendentalism is not only a religious need but also a social one...
...Extreme traditionalists asserted everything must be Islamic in letter and form and in contrast there emerged a variety of schools of thought in the name of psyche and Freud, the German school of dialectics and Hegel, the legal school of reason, law and patriotism, and the advocates of the new religion of Marx and Lenin...
...They are trying to acquire a monopoly over the conscience of the Moslem whom God has ordained free...
...At that moment Britain moved into Alexandria to back the king against the people...
...Khalid called on Egypt to look eastward and westward—to gain experiences from both directions...
...And when told he will respond readily to whatever he is told...
...The new Arab unity is not a deed left by a certain sherif to his sons and grandsons...
...that all those who keep evoking solutions to contemporary problems from Moslem tradition are imposing a priesthood on a religion which believes in direct individual contact between man and God...
...Chimneys rose high, competing with minarets, and Egypt became the citadel of Mohammed Ali...
...This movement of mass awakening, opening its eyes after a centurieslong slumber, goes on almost unnoticed...
...The society was growing, the labor force was growing, the army was enlarging its ranks after the 1936 treaty which gave Egypt a freer hand in building a new army...
...School books, discussion, reading offer them a new and powerful medium of mass communication...
...They opened the closed doors...
...Some escaped in ivory towers and others crept into indifference...
...Egyptian industry was not encouraged...
...Islam, they said, embodies the belief that it is the fulfilment of previous revelations and the final revelation of the Eternal God concerning the truth of the universe, of man and his destiny...
...The students constitute an urbanizing force even if they come from the countryside...
...This cleavage between the landowners and the landless meant each began to develop his own society...
...Their lavish life added to the physical discontent and frustration of the mass of the people...
...People are not only praying to God, but are laboring to achieve what they have continued to pray for over generations...
...King Cotton became master...
...Names might differ, royal families change, but the sovereign remains the same—a monarch and a royal family...
...This Egypt was a country of contrasts, a big palace surrounded by mud huts...
...The land reform, however, was the most peaceful one in recent history and the most effective one of any under-developed country...
...In Egypt there was a need for "a hero effect...
...The monarchy was abolished...
...At that time a change that was already taking place reached its fruition all over Egypt .. . The Fellah In the Classroom Education, whatever the reason for its inception, whether for the expansion of a modern army or the supply of trained bureaucrats for modern government machinery or for enlightenment, is a laboratory for the Westernization of hundreds of thousands of people, the sons of hundreds and thousands of fellahin...
...This force does not seem to count in the calculus of their politics for it is assumed that the fellah will be told...
...Some said that the restricted constitution of 1923 offered a reasonable basis for Egypt, the majority wanted the total evacuation of the British, and a few wanted no negotiations until after full evacuation...
...Their main function was to finance the export of cotton...
...its free festivities and uninhibited promises accentuated the process of political communication...
...In students coming mostly from a severely paternal family system, it engenders idealism and invites action...
...This led to the creation of Banque Misr and its affiliated 15 industrial companies ushering in a local bourgeoisie...
...They were able to maintain their control over the fellahin by the traditional subordination of the peasantry to the landowners, coupled with the machinery of traditional religion and the police force...
...Islam offers them spiritual ideas and a sense of transcendence...
...So, landownership was limited to 200 acres...
...There was no thought or hope but to trust in the young, for they alone are the disinterested...
...This system served well the Lancashire textile market, but the fruits of the land went neither to the sovereign nor the government, nor to the toilers of the land...
...He wants to build, with dignity and in peace, his homeland...
...They do not want slave drivers who sign a treaty with a foreign protector and who then get the cream of the land...
...So went the debate—a return to traditional Islam or a freer outlook on Islam...
...The Vicious Trinity Egypt was left with an unholy trinity—a king, the landlords, and the British...
...The students set themselves up as the trustees of Egypt, trying to end internal exploitation and liberate the country from the foreign occupiers...
...They were suitably divided between the British and foreign exporters and the landlords...
...They did not transform Egypt into a British-style colony, as in the case of India...
...The international equilibrium in the East Mediterranean was not long disturbed, for the European powers chased Mohammed Ali back to Egypt and the empire was limited to Egypt and the Sudan under Ottoman tutelage...
...They stayed more than eighty years...
...Every dawn from the minarets of the Arab World comes the call to prayer: "Come to pray, come to your self-betterment...
...The army had been the shield of the king and it was transformed into the shield of the people...
...They did, however, transform Egypt into a huge farm...
...The split between what is thought, written and told, and what actually goes on, is constantly emphasized by changes beyond the expectations of even the informed...
...Meanwhile there is a need for a social ideology that will answer the urge for social reform, for individual liberty within the bonds of unity —a social system that will be harmonious with the essence of religion and will mold it in such a form that it will be comprehensible within the Egyptian political and social experience...
...Such an unnatural state of affairs could not last indefinitely, and as early as 1879, when the Egyptian press began to enjoy some freedom of expression, a first attempt was made to remedy it by laying the foundation for a native bourgeoisie...
...From Here We Learn" retorted the traditionalists...
...This maldistribution of ownership was aggravated by the inadequacy of the arable acreage...
...yet more than 99 per cent of Egyptian business was conducted by foreigners...
...After the revolution of 1919 came the rise of political parties...
...The industrial revolution in Egypt began as a revolution in the organization of the machinery of war...
...Still when it comes to fundamental questions the young shy away, leaving accumulated questions unanswered...
...There was no one in the country to carry on legitimate opposition...
...The landowners started to imitate the masters of Egypt, the king and the British, developing tastes and modes of life different from those rooted in their environment...
...In the cities the romantic political agitation centered its attack on the state of peasant misery...
...The problem was partly relieved in the past by migrations to urban centers...
...The isolated villager invaded the Middle East, went to Greece, the heart of Arabia, even to Asia Minor, bringing Turkey, the "sick man of Europe," almost to its death...
...Egyptians took a rather pragmatic approach...
...European capital was attracted to a remunerative money market in Egypt while the system of capitulations (foreign privileges) offered it a privileged position...
...Not only economic inequality prevailed in the countryside, but also social alienation...
...Land Reform in Egypt, by Sayed Marie, 1957...
...An army needs engineers, doctors, topographers and geologists...
...This was the single, most effective anti-Communist move in the modern Middle East...
...eastward, joining the lands of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia to Cairo...
...Mass conversion to any new ideology is most unlikely to challenge the fundamental belief in man's equality under God as presented by Islam...
...When Syria and Egypt moved with ease and effectiveness to their unity, experts were still telling us how impossible this was...
...prodigal sons, seeking election, come back with embraces and words...
...Life in the country keeps rolling on...
...ments when they smelled treason...
...they alone are the carriers of change in a society undergoing a critical period of transition...
...it exerts a unifying effect...
...It is fitting for all times and all places, and what is needed is the right interpretation...
...The story went on, khedive after khedive [lord after lord], new experiments, new hopes, new frustrations...
...They were able to organize mass public demonstrations, to use the mass media, pressure organizations and propaganda, to topple govern...
...It captures no headlines...
Vol. 5 • July 1958 • No. 3
