The Egyptian Peasant

By Henry Habib Ayrout and John A. Williams

Egypt has changed enormously in the last half century, and nowhere more so than in the villages of the Nile Valley. Electrification, radio, and television have brought the larger world into the houses. Government schools have increased educational horizons for the children. Opportunities to work in other areas of the Arab world have been extended to peasants as well as to young artisans from the towns. Urbanization has brought many families to live in the belts of substandard housing around the major cities.

But the conservative and traditional world of unremitting labor that characterizes the lives of the Egyptian peasants, or fellaheen, also survives, and nowhere has it been better described than in this classic account by Father Henry Habib Ayrout, an Egyptian Jesuit sociologist who dedicated most of his life to creating a network of free schools for rural children at a time when there were very few. First published in French in 1938, the book went through several revisions by the author before being translated and published in English in 1963. The often poetic yet factual and deeply empathetic description Father Ayrout left of fellah life is still reliable and still poignant; a measure by which the progress of the countryside must always be gauged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781617972492

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Introduction by Morroe Berger

In 1960, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic incidentally focused attention upon the Egyptian peasant in a speech explaining his reasons for nationalizing the press. Devoted to sensational trivialities, he said, the press ignored the true Egypt. Where might that be found? The president pointed to a village near Alexandria, Kafr el Battikh, or Water-melonville.

Taking the president at his word, a New York Times reporter went to Watermelonville and found a situation confirming what the reader will find in Father Ayrout’s sensitive portrayal first written more than a generation earlier. This similarity, I think, immediately answers an important question: How up-to-date is Father Ayrout’s description? In all its essentials, the picture still fits the subject. Father Ayrout has himself made some revisions in the original manuscript.

Nor should this stability of the Egyptian countryside surprise anyone. During thousands of years, Father Ayrout says, the peasants have changed their masters, their religion, their language, and their crops, but not their way of life. From a more recent perspective, too, things have not changed very much. The number of rural health centers and the salaries of the doctors and nurses are today not what they were when Father Ayrout wrote, but the more important things he describes remain the same: the centers are still inadequately manned and the staff still underpaid.

Father Ayrout’s method of inquiry has enabled him to preserve the relevance of his study. In the first place, though he knows the value of statistics, he is more interested in analyzing and reporting the meaning of a mode of existence to those who follow it—I might say, in this case, to its victims. And a meaning, of course, changes much more slowly than a frequency distribution. Second, he is interested in the Egyptian peasant, though he knows that peasants everywhere have much in common. Ignazio Silone, in his beautiful novel about the Italian peasant, Fontamara, remarks that "all poor farmers are alike in every country. They are men who cause the earth to bear fruit; they suffer from hunger; and whether they are called fellahs, peons, muzhiks or cafoni, they form their own nation, their own race and their own church all over the world, even though no two are exactly alike."

Even though no two are exactly alike—here is the point for Father Ayrout. He succeeds in showing us not only what it means to be a peasant but more exactly what it means to be a fellah, an Egyptian peasant. He is less interested in generalizations about peasant life than in making you feel with your fingertips and sense with your soul the material and spiritual condition of the Egyptian peasant. So Father Ayrout writes both as an advocate and an observer, with sympathy and detachment. And he writes about every aspect of the peasant’s life, from his relation to the central government down to the squabbles over a foot of land and a bit of water, from his religious conceptions and rites down to the kind of underclothes he wears.

This approach to human behavior—sympathetic and all- embracing—stems from a peculiarly French tradition of human geography, ethnography and sociology. In America, we have a different tradition—the cultural sciences, the social sciences, and now the behavioral sciences. Our prevailing method is to cover a range of human behavior in statistically expressed frequencies or in models from which the path of return to the things abstracted is never found. Father Ayrout seeks to do something else again, to describe a range of behavior by selecting certain features at its core and then making us understand those elements intimately.

Americans, moreover, may find Father Ayrout’s approach romantic. Traditional rites and customs in the Egyptian village, he says, are a mysterious correlation of nature and man. The soil, he says, explains the changelessness of peasant life. We are not accustomed any more to such characterizations, yet I wonder if our more prosaic and apparently scientific language brings us any closer to an explanation. Regarding the improvement of farming methods, Father Ayrout says not only that the peasant will not mechanize but adds that he should not. Why not? His reason seems utterly romantic: for to mechanize agriculture will destroy the organic relation which has grown up between the people and the land . . . But he adds another reason based upon a quite realistic calculation of Egypt’s economic and demographic situation. Mechanization, he says, will also overthrow a way of life which has grown up as the only one suitable for an abundant population on a limited soil.

Mechanization has nevertheless proceeded. Aside from irrigation and drainage, where mechanization had already been highly developed of necessity, the number of farm machines has probably increased about fifteen times in the last quarter-century. Thus, increase, though considerable, has been made on a very small foundation, for in 1935 there were in all of Egypt only a thousand farm machines.*

Productivity per farm worker has increased as a result of increasing use of machinery and the expansion of crop area worked by a stable labor force. It is reliably estimated that average per capita productivity has increased by about a third since the period before World War II.

The cropped area has increased, productivity has increased, volume of agricultural production has increased—but the peasant seems no better off materially. For he has had to feed a rapidly increasing population, one which grows about five times as fast as the cultivated area.

This man-land ratio is of course a fundamental problem in Egypt. It has not changed much since Ayrout first referred to it, though the regime that overthrew the monarchy has made a considerable effort, beginning with the land reform of 1952, to change it. Father Ayrout correctly evaluates this effort when he says in his epilogue that it has been genuine, has thus far hardly affected the situation, and must be continued. The 1952 land reform, he asserts, nevertheless, represents the finest gift of the new regime to the long-neglected peasants. He gives figures for land distribution in 1948, four years before the reform. During the half-century before 1948, fragmentation of holdings proceeded steadily; the number of holdings of five acres or less quadrupled as the total area they occupied only doubled.

The Egyptian land reform of 1952 limited individual ownership to 200 acres, compensated owners for the excess in government bonds at 3 per cent interest and redeemable in thirty years, and distributed the land in plots of two to five acres to peasants who were to pay the cost over thirty years at 3 per cent interest. Modifications of the law in 1958 and 1961 reduced the maximum to one hundred acres, fixed compensation for seizure of the excess at 1½ per cent interest over forty years, and reduced by half the amount of money new owners still owed the government for their plots as well as the interest rate on this debt. Thus, about 750,000 acres have been made available for distribution, of which perhaps 500,000 have already been resold to about 200,000 peasant owners. Thus less than a tenth of Egypt’s cultivated land has been distributed in this way and the number of new owners is only about 7 per cent of all owners. Since most new owners have been sold very small plots (nearer the minimum of two acres than the maximum of five), fragmentation has continued unabated. The government, however, has sought to mitigate its harmful effects by requiring all new owners to join cooperatives.

The agrarian reform also affected tenants, sharecroppers and farm laborers. Maximum rents were fixed, and the portion of a crop going to a landlord was established at one half of the value of crop after deduction of all expenses, including the cropper’s. Tenants were protected further by a provision that land leases must be in writing and for a period of at least three years. Minimum wages were established for agricultural workers and their right to form trade unions was asserted.

What has been the effect? The owners of large estates have lost income and power. Some of the income has gone to the new owners and to tenants but the lost power has gone to the regime. The agricultural workers have gained little because their oversupply has made it difficult to enforce the minimum wage. Though the new owners and tenants have enjoyed a real advance in standard of living, the effect of the whole agrarian reform upon the agricultural economy and the peasant’s way of life has been rather small.

Thus far, then, the Arab socialism proclaimed in 1961 has not affected the countryside very much, nor have its tenets been applied there nearly so much as to the urban economy. Indeed, President Nasser has assured the peasant that Arab socialism does not mean an end to private ownership of land or that the small plots will be taken from their new owners.

In June 1962, however, awareness of the population problem reached new proportions in Egypt as Arab socialism was widely discussed. President Nasser approved family planning. It is increasingly realized that if advances in the economy have to be shared among a rapidly growing population, then economic growth will be accompanied by only a stationary or even declining level of existence for most people. With all the government’s plans for land reclamation and even including the million and a quarter cultivable acres expected to result from the completion of the new high dam at Aswan, the per capita share of cultivable land will remain stationary. This share has been decreasing as a result of the fact, noted above, that population has increased much more rapidly than cultivated area. In 1937 the per capita share was about a third of an acre, in 1950 little more than a quarter, and by 1960 it had declined to less than a quarter. The plans for adding cultivable land envisage, for 1970, that the per capita share will be only maintained.

Since Father Ayrout wrote his first account of the peasant’s life, there has been, as we have seen, a considerable effort on the part of the government to end the long years of neglect. There has been land reform, an expansion of rural health centers, land reclamation, the beginning of the new high dam at Aswan, the experiment in Liberation Province to establish cooperative farm communities, expansion of education, new forms of rural representation in the national political system, and now a renewed concern about family planning. International agencies have also entered the scene. UNESCO has at Sirs el Layyan, near Cairo, an Arab States Fundamental Education Center, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN has a program, and various forms of technical assistance have been provided by American governmental and private agencies. All these efforts are pointed toward the great task Father Ayrout indicates: The reconstruction of the Egyptian villages demands the re-education of their inhabitants, and first of all women. . . . We must work from the inside out. As one who has long been involved in such efforts in the villages, he knows that they can sometimes be over-organized and underproductive. Success in this kind of exacting work, he warns, requires more understanding, personal care and love than committees, speeches and official decrees.

We hear a great deal nowadays about the peasant’s growing political interests and nationalist feelings, his sense of the new possibilities of life and his desire for change. These attitudes, Father Ayrout shows, have hardly begun to develop in Egypt, though he observes that the suppression of feudalism has opened the way for the peasant to participate in the future in real social democracy. Since 1952 the government has sought to awaken ambition and expectation among the peasants and to draw them into the political life of the nation through various devices, the latest of which is the National Congress of Popular Forces. The peasants, along with other occupational and social groups, are represented in the Congress, though not in their proportion to the total population or labor force. (In the economically advanced societies of the West, where agriculture is usually prosperous, the countryside exercises greater political power than its proportion of the population warrants. In the poorer lands of Asia, the urban sector has the advantage.)

As Father Ayrout says of the peasant, Though he is more truly Egyptian than many political figures, he is still not conscious of belonging to a nation. That explains why in the different nationalist movements the fellahin have taken no part. Occasionally their enthusiasm has been stirred, as in the Revolution of 1952, but they themselves have remained spectators. Many observers will argue that this is no longer the case, yet there is not much evidence of change. Several recent studies of the Egyptian village have revealed a slowly increasing awareness of what is happening in the cities and capitals, but not a disposition to do anything. This apathy has nothing to do with innate intelligence or morality, of which the peasant has his reasonable share; it is the result of a long memory and healthy skepticism.

Father Ayrout’s portrait, therefore, still stands. Yet certain economic and political changes already made may one day produce a new social arrangement and new attitudes in the Egyptian countryside. So long as change is inchoate, this book retains its currency. And if the fellah truly changes, you will have here the most reliable and poignant account of the life he left behind.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

April 1962

*  These and the following statistics are taken from official reports presented in (1) U.A.R. Statistical Department, Statistical Pocket Year-book, 1957, Government Printing Office, Cairo, 1958; (2) Land Tenure in Egypt, National Bank of Egypt, Economic Bulletin, 1957, X: 46–48; and (3) Post-War Agricultural Developments in the Egyptian Region, Central Bank of Egypt, Economic Review, 1961, I: