Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800-1952

By Mine Ener

This richly textured social history recovers the voices and experiences of poor Egyptians--beggars, foundlings, the sick and maimed--giving them a history for the first time. As Mine Ener tells their fascinating stories alongside those of reformers, tourists, politicians, and philanthropists, she explores the economic, political, and colonial context that shaped poverty policy for a century and a half.


While poverty and poverty relief have been extensively studied in the North American and European contexts, there has been little research done on the issue for the Middle East--and scant comprehensive presentation of the Islamic ethos that has guided charitable action in the region. Drawing on British and Egyptian archival sources, Ener documents transformations in poor relief, changing attitudes toward the public poor, the entrance of new state and private actors in the field of charity, the motivations behind their efforts, and the poor's use of programs created to help them. She also fosters a dialogue between Middle Eastern studies and those who study poverty relief elsewhere by explicitly comparing Egypt's poor relief to policies in Istanbul and also Western Europe, Russia, and North America.


Heralding a new kind of research into how societies care for the destitute--and into the religious prerogatives that guide them--this book is one of the first in-depth studies of charity and philanthropy in a region whose social problems have never been of greater interest to the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 22, 2003
• ISBN: 9781400844357

Mine Ener

Mine Ener was Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History and Islamic Civilization at Villanova University. She was a coeditor of Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts.

Book preview

MANAGING EGYPT’S POOR AND THE POLITICS OF BENEVOLENCE, 1800–1952

MANAGING EGYPT’S POOR AND THE POLITICS OF BENEVOLENCE, 1800–1952

Mine Ener

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

COPYRIGHT © 2003 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

ENER, MINE, 1965–

MANAGING EGYPT’S POOR AND THE POLITICS OF BENEVOLENCE, 1800—1952 / MINE ENER.

P. CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

ISBN 0-691-11378-5 (ALK. PAPER)

1. POVERTY—EGYPT—HISTORY. 2. CHARITIES—EGYPT—HISTORY. 3. ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE, DOMESTIC—EGYPT. 4. EGYPT—SOCIAL POLICY. I. TITLE.

HC830.Z9 P614 2003

362.5′8′096209034—DC21     2002035479

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN SABON

PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. ∞

WWW.PUPRESS.PRINCETON.EDU

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS    vii

PREFACE: FINDING EGYPT’S POOR    ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS    xxvii

I

Benevolence, Charity, and Philanthropy    1

II

Discerning between the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor    26

III

Among the Poor of Takiyyat Tulun    49

IV

The Spectacle of the Poor    76

V

The Future of the Nation    99

VI

Conclusion: From the Poor to Poverty    134

NOTES    145

BIBLIOGRAPHY    175

INDEX    191

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

FINDING EGYPT’S POOR

It is February 1994, and I am working in the principal reading room of the Egyptian National Archives. As I shiver from the damp of the Cairo winter, I struggle to understand events that transpired in this city nearly a century and a half earlier: The director of Mahall al-Khayriyyat issues appeals to the government storehouse for bread to feed the poor who show up daily. Beggars are arrested and sent to another building, Takiyyat Tulun. A young girl, having been expelled from Takiyyat Tulun, pleads to be let back in. What are these institutions? I ask myself. Why are beggars being arrested?

What are these institutions? And why are beggars being arrested? I ask fellow researchers in the archives. Mahall al-Khayriyyat is clearly a soup kitchen, but is it a religious endowment? Everyone is certain that Takiyyat Tulun is a Sufi lodge (or tekke) in the neighborhood of Ahmad ibn Tulun Mosque, but although I know that tekkes traditionally cared for the indigent and their own members, I am sure that this cannot be the case. In response to my second question, my colleagues simply shrug; one of them jokingly gives me a five-piaster coin. This group of friends are used to my crazy questions, and they constantly tease me about my research topic. They cannot understand why I, as an American, am so fascinated with begging.

But in the weeks and months that follow, my suspicions about these two institutions are confirmed. I learn that the Mahall al-Khayriyyat served as a government soup kitchen in the mid-nineteenth century, providing one thousand meals daily, and that Takiyyat Tulun was a state-run shelter located within the walls of the Ahmad ibn Tulun Mosque. Both reflected the state’s appropriation of traditional concepts of care for the poor. Attempts to arrest beggars, I discover, represented novel approaches to poor relief during this era. As I continue my research, I realize that I am not the only foreigner who has ever displayed an interest in Egypt’s beggars.

AT THE DABTIYYA, the Central Police Department, of Cairo, interchanges between the Egyptian populace and the state demonstrate the central role this office played in assisting the needy and gave me more clues on the function of Takiyyat Tulun and other institutions: Aysha bint Hasan appeared at the Dabtiyya in January 1854, anxious to find her sister. Might my sister be among the poor of Takiyyat Tulun? she asked. A few weeks later, Sheikh Hasan told officials of the Dabtiyya, I’m looking for my wife, Suhag. If she is among the poor of Takiyyat Tulun, I would like to procure her release. I promise to take care of her." In 1863 Sulayman, seeking his daughter Khadra, who had been committed to the insane asylum, traveled 13.5 miles from his hometown of Nawa in Qalyubiyya Province to Cairo. He too hoped that officials of the Dabtiyya could help him locate his loved one. In each of these three instances, the Dabtiyya sent word to the Civilian Hospital, which was responsible for the administration of Takiyyat Tulun and the insane asylum, to find out whether the people being sought were in these institutions.

Takiyyat Tulun, a poorhouse established within the structure of Ahmad ibn Tulun Mosque, and the insane asylum, located after the mid-nineteenth century in Bulaq, were two places to which Egypt’s indigent sought admission or were involuntarily confined.¹ Established at nearly mid-century, these institutions gave shelter and care to individuals whose families could not provide for them. In each instance cited here, the people who made queries at the Dabtiyya came prepared to prove to officials that they were ready and able to care for their relatives.

We do not know the outcomes of the familial dramas that led Aysha, Sheikh Hasan, and Sulayman to the Dabtiyya. Nor do these particular accounts of their quests reveal whether their inquiries were their first or their last. Like Aysha, Sheikh Hasan, and Sulayman, I set out to find missing people, individuals who until recently had fallen through the cracks of Egyptian historiography. The people I sought identified themselves and were described by others, such as state officials and European and Egyptian observers and reformers, as the poor. Like the three people who hoped to obtain help from the police, I too consulted numerous state agencies—or rather their records—to find information on their circumstances and the options for assistance that they pursued. Takiyyat Tulun and the insane asylum were not the only formal recourses for care available during this period. Before the establishment of Takiyyat Tulun, the poor had been sheltered in a structure known as the Maristan Qalawun. This institution, which had been founded by the Mamluk sultan Qalawun in 1284, housed a hospital, an insane asylum, and an almshouse. A civilian hospital admitted the indigent for medical services, free of charge, and an orphanage and foundling home took in children whose parents could not provide for them, as well as abandoned children found in the streets of Cairo. In addition, toward the end of the nineteenth century, members of the indigenous elite and foreigners residing in Egypt established private charitable associations that distributed food and clothing and provided other means of assistance to Egypt’s destitute. By the mid-twentieth century, concern about the poor had taken another turn and resulted in the creation of other avenues of poor relief: during of the 1940s and the early 1950s, political parties and Egypt’s monarch, King Farouk, vied with one another to prove their ability to provide for the poor.

Records of these various state and private institutions and discussions demonstrating the poor’s centrality to political struggles gave me insights on the experiences of the poor. But of equal importance, these materials also illuminated the various uses charity served over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Egypt.

My queries led me to records pertaining to the most desperately poor, individuals who claimed that they had no one to take care of them and that they owned nothing. In many cases, these individuals could not work due to physical difficulties, such as blindness or lameness, or due to the responsibilities of taking care of children without the help of a spouse or an extended family. In some cases, the individuals I encountered could not speak for themselves; these people included abandoned infants as well as the mute and the insane. Without resources or families and relatives to provide assistance, these people were entirely dependent on the charity of their neighbors and, as I illustrate in this book, the benevolence of the state and emergent philanthropic organizations.

This book takes the initiation of new state interventions in poor relief in the first half of the nineteenth century as its point of departure to put the itinerant poor, the benevolent actions of the state and private actors, and transformations in attitudes and policies toward the poor in Egypt at the center of its historical analysis. Although Alexandria was also the site of two poor shelters, the Qishla al-Sadaqa (Hospital of Charity) and the Takiyyat Qabbari (the Tekke of Qabbari), the focus is largely on the establishment and use of two shelters in Cairo as well as the discourse (on the part of indigenous Egyptians and foreigners) concerning the public presence of the poor in this city. Although I provide a survey of various forms of assistance to the poor (including religious endowments and funds from the state treasury—the Bayt al-Mal) in the introductory chapter, my focus is on specific institutions and organizations whose primary concerns were the public (that is, publicly visible) poor. Given the paucity of sources on income and the absence of information on caloric intake or quality of housing, I do not endeavor to document poverty and the extent of impoverishment. Nor do I undertake an examination of relative poverty and the conditions of the laboring poor. Rather, I focus almost entirely on those poor whose presence in public spaces made them an object of government concern and, in the late nineteenth century and onward, a target of numerous actors (private associations as well as members of Egypt’s government) who sought to demonstrate their commitment to ameliorating the conditions in which the most destitute lived. While recognizing that the laboring poor and the lives and experiences of the lower classes are an important topic of analysis, I have restricted myself to individuals whom others (such as the state, foreigners, and religious organizations) identified as the poor and their interactions with the state and private groups at moments when they sought assistance or became the targets of criticism. In looking at those individuals whom others have identified in this fashion, I endeavor to understand the very criteria of need that the state and private individuals and organizations introduced as a means of measuring whether a poor person deserved assistance. As I show, the charitable actions of the government and of associations were kept in check by emergent notions of who constituted the deserving poor and who merited assistance.

Drawing from a range of sources–including police registers, government correspondence pertaining to policies toward the itinerant poor, records of petitions, lists of shelter residents, the notes of foreign and indigenous observers, and records documenting the care provided to abandoned infants and children—located in the Egyptian National Archives, the British Museum, and the Public Records Office, the first three chapters detail transformations in poor relief over the course of the nineteenth century. Through analysis of these materials, I situate these developments within the context of Islamic and Ottoman practices of charity and policies toward the poor to demonstrate that the unique features of Egypt’s poor-relief practices must be understood within the economic changes under way during this period. Making use of materials available in the Başbakanlık Archives in Istanbul and other primary sources, I compare historical and contemporaneous practices of poor relief at the center of the Ottoman Empire—in the capital of Istanbul—with those of Cairo so as to enhance our understanding of the extent to which policies toward the poor in Egypt at times emulated and at times diverged from those at the center.

In the following two chapters, my scope narrows from an analysis of state-sponsored practices to the perceptions and actions of private individuals and associations. In these chapters, drawing from materials in Egyptian and British archives and travel literature published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I document how the public poor were politicized. The spectacle of the poor and tropes of Egypt’s poverty were key features in foreign accounts of conditions in Egypt during the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the century, concern about the public presence of the poor became an important aspect of the programs of indigenous and multiethnic associations founded in Egypt. During the last decades of the monarchy, the poor became a political pawn in the struggles for political legitimacy that were waged between the palace and political parties.

The experiences of the poor, their interactions with the state, and the institutions in which they sought shelter (or in which they were incarcerated) form one of the core structures of this text. Again and again, I present the figure of the beggar, the foundling, and the anxious family member. I examine the circumstances that led them to seek assistance and the care they received. Woven throughout this text are the sometimes incriminating, sometimes compassionate remarks that observers (government officials, foreigners visiting or working in Egypt, and reformers) made regarding the public presence of beggars. At the same time, we repeatedly encounter the state and private actors who engaged in charitable actions. In this latter regard, I provide an analysis of the motivations behind the establishment of specialized institutions for the poor and the goals of the foundations established by philanthropic associations.

As this book explores the emergence of new institutions and the involvement of new actors in the field of poor relief, it also presents developments in practices and policies toward the poor. The economic and political context of poor relief, the colonial framework, and changing perceptions toward the poor serve as lenses through which to view transformations and understand the politicization of the poor.

In each aspect of our interactions with the public poor, the state, its institutions, and individuals involved in philanthropy, we witness Egypt’s encounters with modernity. Within the frame of poor relief, we see the development of bureaucratized apparatuses through which many of Egypt’s poor astutely navigated as they sought assistance, we come face to face with secularized and specialized institutions that replaced traditional structures, and we see how by the early twentieth century charity came to serve practical and political purposes. Although charity never ceased to be grounded in religious prerogatives, its very implementation had meanings that extended well beyond religious doctrines.

Until now, the poor and practices of poor relief in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt have not been topics of inquiry for historians and social scientists. However, the findings of scholars who have examined the consequences of state building and the economic, social, and political developments initiated by Muhammad Ali, Egypt’s governor, in the early nineteenth century and their discussions of the ramifications of his projects and the subsequent transformations initiated by his successors highlight how new state interventions affected the lives of the populace as a whole.

Given his position as the architect of many programs in Egypt, and due to his military exploits, which challenged the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II and brought the British more prominently into the Middle East (both in terms of trade and as allies of the Ottomans in their wars against Egypt’s armies), Muhammad Ali has figured prominently in the historiography of Egypt in the first part of the nineteenth century. On one hand scholars have explored the motivations behind his numerous domestic and foreign projects, arguing that his programs had as one of their goals the creation of an independent nation.² On the other hand, recent scholarship has challenged this perspective, instead arguing that Muhammad Ali’s intentions, and specifically his establishment of an army and numerous industries geared toward the military, were directed toward his own dynastic ends, not the goal of securing an independent Egyptian nation.³ As much as the intentions behind Muhammad Ali’s actions are a source of contention, the very identity of Egypt in the nineteenth century is a source of fierce debate: some scholars, such as Ehud Toledano, contend that Egypt was, during the period of Muhammad Ali as well as in the reigns of his successors, Ottoman. The language of Egypt’s rulers, their cultural orientations, and their political allegiances make clear that throughout the nineteenth century, Egypt remained culturally and politically within the Ottoman fold.⁴

Historians have examined the era of Muhammad Ali and the reigns of his successors from the perspective of the domestic programs they introduced as well as from the angle of the impact these programs had on the Egyptian populace. In their works, some information on the experiences of the poor can be found. Timothy Mitchell documents the advent of the increasingly interventionist state in nineteenth-century Egypt through an exploration of the myriad ways in which Muhammad Ali’s government and the regimes of his successors attempted to control, order, and discipline the Egyptian populace. Mitchell’s discussion of this era has highlighted the coercive and discursive means through which governments in the period preceding and during the British occupation (1882–1952) sought to maintain control over and make the best use of Egypt’s populace. However, as Khaled Fahmy argues, Mitchell’s book does not illustrate the points at which these projects failed or never came to fruition. Although state intervention commencing in the reign of Muhammad Ali was pervasive, it was not absolute. Rural and urban inhabitants resisted the actions of the state, fleeing conscription and other government exactions on their lives.⁵

Many of Mitchell’s findings rest on blueprints for programs or plans that were not necessarily enacted completely (or successfully). Economic historians, however, provide us with a more complete understanding of the impact that actual programs and agricultural transformations—under way in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century Egypt—had on the rural peasantry. Roger Owen illustrates how the production of cotton, and specifically the movement to create a monoculture of cotton, transformed the economy and the peasantry’s relationship with their land and the state. By the second half of the nineteenth century, taxation and other privations had turned many rural Egyptians into landless tenants or had forced peasants to find work in the cities.⁶ Kenneth Cuno’s analysis of land ownership in Lower Egypt illustrates how features of the Egyptian countryside previously posited as nineteenth-century transformations (such as the commodification of land, cash-crop agriculture, and marked differences between the rural rich and poor) were well in place decades before the rise of Muhammad Ali. In addition to eloquently demonstrating how rural transformations were a feature of eighteenth-century Egypt, Cuno’s analysis of the changes under way during Muhammad Ali’s rule provide insights on the impact of taxation demands and the resulting indebtedness of peasants. Indicative of the scope of economic difficulties the rural poor experienced were transactions such as the reassignment of land to other peasants and officials who paid peasants’ tax arrears (even though in some cases peasants continued working the land they had lost) as well as the redistribution of land whose owners were in tax arrears due to peasant flight.⁷

Judith Tucker’s groundbreaking work (Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt) on the experiences of urban and rural women from the beginning of the nineteenth century until World War I lays an essential foundation for our understanding of the multiple avenues of women’s participation in Egyptian society. Her use of Shariʿa (Islamic Law) Court registers sheds light on the experiences of many lower-class urban women as well as peasant women of modest means. Contextualizing her analysis within the rapid political, economic, and social changes of the period, Tucker documents the ways in which peasant and urban women partook in agricultural production, disputes over property, and urban occupations. Throughout the extensive transformations under way in nineteenth-century Egypt, women struggled with increasing state intervention in their lives and state-imposed practices such as agricultural monopolies (during the reign of Muhammad Ali), military conscription, and the demands corvée (a system that lasted into the first decades of the twentieth century) made on them and their families.⁸

Laverne Kuhnke’s book on public health projects in nineteenth-century Egypt, though state centered in its analysis, gives us further glimpses of the interaction between the populace of Egypt and the government in terms of the establishment of hospitals, vaccination programs, and quarantines. Showing how the introduction of such programs was set against the backdrop of increased governmental concern about issues of sanitation and efforts to stop the spread and devastation caused by plagues and cholera, Lives at Risk provides insights into the conditions in which many Egyptians lived, their initial rejection of government-sponsored vaccination programs (out of fear that these projects were intended to mark children for future military service), and their attempts to avoid being admitted to government-run hospitals.⁹ However, contrary to Kuhnke’s findings, records document the number of Egyptians who sought medical assistance, thus indicating that many of the poor—perhaps out of desperation—resorted to state forms of medical care.¹⁰

More than any other scholars of modern Egypt, Tucker and Toledano have sought to understand the effects that changing economic and political circumstances had on Egypt’s population, centering their analyses on women (Tucker) and individuals described as marginal (Toledano), who included the poor and the unemployed. Tucker closely examines the ways in which families took care of their dependents and briefly notes the existence of a few embryonic state institutions that evolved in response to dire need for assistance which grew as traditional forms of mutual aid faltered.¹¹ However, she does not discuss the nature and function of these emerging institutions. Toledano’s astute analysis of police records from the middle of the nineteenth century, an era that has received less attention than the reigns of Muhammad Ali, Ismail (1863–79), and Tawfiq (1879–92), which immediately preceded the British occupation, elucidates the range of assistance options available to the destitute of Cairo as well as recent migrants. Toledano discusses the role of institutions such as Sufi lodges, which served as temporary residences for recent migrants, and provides an in-depth analysis of the precarious position in which migrants and people without networks of support found themselves upon their arrival to cities such as Cairo. Although Toledano focuses on the criminalization of Egypt’s marginals, he does not explore the ways in which some of these people also sought and received assistance from the state.

My own research on poor relief during this era draws heavily on Toledano’s and Tucker’s discussions of the dislocations and other difficulties that the rural peasantry and urban dwellers experienced. But my analysis of sources focuses almost exclusively on the lives of men, women, and children who fell outside the scope of their research and the assistance options available to them. The individuals whose history I seek to recover include the invalid, the elderly, orphaned and abandoned children, women who could not depend on their families to take care of them, and people who did not come into contact with the law as a result of criminal wrongdoing.

A further feature of my research that sheds light on Egypt’s social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is my analysis of the ways in which the poor actively sought the assistance of state and private agencies. Until now, scholars of Egypt have focused on the disciplining aspects of the creation of modern state apparatuses, interpreting the actions of the increasingly interventionist state (particularly during Muhammad Ali’s nearly four decades of governance) as efforts of social control. However, as I illustrate, the ultimate outcomes of poor-relief strategies were not what their founders had intended. To put it succinctly, although shelters for the poor were established with the intent of clearing the streets of the itinerant poor, by the 1850s the poor came to make increasing requests to the state for admission to these shelters. Over time, the number of individuals seeking assistance from the state overtaxed the available resources. The end result was that Cairo authorities were never able to completely control the public presence of the urban poor. Much to the consternation of city officials and foreign and indigenous reformers and observers, beggars and the itinerant poor continued to be a constant feature of Cairo’s public spaces.

Works on the economic, political, and social changes under way in nineteenth-century Egypt have for the most part been devoid of discussion of the continued role that religion played in the Egyptian practice of statecraft. While scholars of Ottoman history in the central Ottoman lands are attentive to these issues in, for example, their discussions of how religious symbols are utilized to legitimize rule, assumptions about the modern and hence increasingly secular nature of the Egyptian state held by scholars of Egypt have resulted in their distancing themselves from an analysis of the continued ways in which religion was a part of the state apparatus and ideology. By examining the charitable initiatives of Muhammad Ali’s government as well as the governments of his successors, we have the opportunity to witness how a particular religious language of benevolence (albeit at times formulaic) served to maintain and reinforce connections between the populace and the state. Contributing to studies geared toward understanding the Ottoman identity of Egypt during the nineteenth century, my research demonstrates that many of the poor-relief policies that Muhammad Ali and his successors undertook were imitations and modifications of practices applied at the center of the Ottoman Empire: their context was both Islamic and Ottoman.

The religious component of poor relief continued to pervade the discourse and actions of members of philanthropic organizations that became active in the field of poor relief at the end of the nineteenth century. But equally important to our understanding of the rise of associations during this period is analysis of the ways in which care for the poor was politicized. Many organizations were founded in reaction to missionary actions and the activities of British residents of Egypt. These associations sought to prove that they were best able to