This will have to be my last post for a while as my wrist still hasn't healed and I need it for other things. Hopefully, I'll return eventually to finish this history.
Egypt was naturally a strategic battleground for the two European powers firstly because of its influence in the Arab world and later because of the important Suez Canal. As I have noted, it was the site of the first modern violation of the Middle East in 1798. Soon after this event, the Albanian Muhammad ‘Ali rose to power in Egypt and quickly recognised and acted upon perceived European technical and military superiority.
He thus began the major translation project from mainly European languages into Arabic (and Turkish, ‘Ali’s first language) and the training, usually in France, of Arab Egyptian future technocrats and military leaders. He also encouraged trade with Europe especially in the famed Egyptian cotton although the terms of trade generally fell in the favour of Europe by this time. The result was the slow infusion into Egypt of European ideas and goods along with the sought technologies and military ideas. Muhammad ‘Ali famously refused the translation of Machiavelli’s the Prince but merely on the basis that its ideas seemed, to ‘Ali, child’s play rather than due to the ideas being at all alien to him.
This infusion of European ideals and material into Egypt may be seen as a model of the process of European colonialism in the Arab world, as I mentioned in an earlier post. In seeking help from the very countries that appeared threatening such as the recent brief invader, Napoleon’s France, and its rival England, ‘Ali ended up inviting an interest that led to the realisation of the very threat feared. While not a direct colony, the materialism engendered by outside influence created demands which led to foreign debts to Europe thus creating a form of dependency. This contrasts with the model (also mentioned in an earlier post) of colonising countries ostensibly acting in the interests of religious and ethnic minorities.
In the case of countries like Egypt, the debt and dependency would later become an excuse for domination by Britain although a large portion of it was for the building of railways in 1850 and a canal in 1869 which were always mainly in the interests of Britain and France in any case.
An uprising in 1879 led by an Egyptian army officer, Ahmad ‘Urabi against the domination and government corruption and moral laxity finally gave a pretext for a full British invasion in 1881. The formally Ottoman ‘rulers’, the khedives of Egypt, were from then on mere puppets of the British, a position made plain by the easy removal of even the façade of Ottoman rule at the commencement of the First World War when the Ottomans took the axis side.
The court systems for Europeans and local non-Muslims and Muslims were made separate, a provision similar to but even more onerous on the local government than provisions that Europeans usually insisted upon wherever they ruled in their period of domination of the world. The Egyptian state thereafter had no jurisdiction over either non-Muslims or Europeans. A significant immigration (but of Greeks more than Britons) occurred into Egypt. The European lifestyle, dress, music and eating habits became fashionable among many Egyptians. Printing presses first set up under Muhammad ‘Ali came into their own. New large landholding, merchant and banking classes, also initiated in the time of Muhammad ‘Ali, came to prominence under the British.
With increased health care, the population also began to substantially increase with a reduced mortality rate preceding a falling fertility rate. An emerging middle class sought power and more leisure. Literature and other cultural and intellectual pursuits developed strongly in this period as did Islamic revivalism. Actual Islamic legal reforms didn’t occur until after independence, however.
Arab nationalist identity politics followed European trends; in the case of Egyptian Arabs their identity was at first defined as anti-Ottoman and eventually anti-British. The Wafd party gained prominence after the First World War and pseudo-independence was declared in 1922.
The region roughly known as Egypt today has managed to maintain a strong central government for much of its history and pre-history (even in the Ottoman period). As a result of its stability, Egypt has also generally tended to be able to be strongly influential in the region as a whole (as it remains).
Minorities are generally well integrated in Egypt. Local disputes have therefore generally tended to concern so-called ‘bread and butter’ economic and social issues rather than confessional issues.
Egypt has also tended to be fertile ground for the student of history because of both a tendency to bureaucracy and a dry climate which has helped to preserve many bureaucratic documents well.
The Cold War and the formation of Israel added their own pressures to the Egyptian state following the Second World War. President Nasser became a major inspiration for pan-Arabism in the Arab world and even briefly united Egypt with a Syria which later regretted wooing the President. The assassinated President Sadat is largely remembered today in Egypt as a traitor for his peace deal with the Israeli Prime Minister, Begin. President Mubarak has now been in power since the early 1980s (an unlikely period of rule for one man in a true democracy). The period of infitah (opening up [to trade with the West]) instituted in recent times has created some pressures for both political and economic liberalisation.
David Bromley suggests (in line with the view I expressed in my post on Syria, I think) that rather than being obstacles to democracy, Islamism and Arab nationalism in Egypt, too, have been the effects of other obstacles that have to do essentially with the ongoing unjust concentration of economic and political power in too few hands, mainly military elites'. Part of the reason for the inhibition of democracy is the willingness of countries and peoples like America and Americans to pay large military rents and tourism dollars to the rulers of Egypt as they pay oil rents to countries like Iraq producing similar issues.
Saad Eddine Ibrahim, a vocal democratic activist and scholar of development based in Egypt, has concluded surveys of the population issues of Egypt especially of the late 20th Century which show a downward trend in fertility comparable with that of many other developing nations. He has also noted, however, particular issues for Egypt. Jacques Berque, writing in the 1960s, noted that the Egyptian government has seen overpopulation as a problem since the 1940s.
Ibrahim suggests the issue was on the agenda in the 1930s but was not unanimously viewed as a problem. This divide in perceptions is one of the issues which he sees as still relevant today in Egypt. There were divisions, too, over whether to allow development to play its role in the decisions of families to have less children (what Ibrahim himself appears to regard as the potentially too-slow way) or to intervene directly by encouraging direct family planning measures. He suggests both approaches should be applied together for optimal results. Conservative Islam apparently plays a part in making the idea of family planning a ‘hard sell’ in Egypt, particularly as many doctors who in other circumstances and countries might be expected to play a role in its promotion fall into the category of conservative Muslims. Ibrahim notes that Nasser favoured the development approach and in fact thought a powerful nation required a large population. That latter view he suggests remains popular today in many Muslim and Arab Socialist circles.
Today another of the unique problems noted by Ibrahim is the uneven distribution of the still burgeoning population leading to overcrowding in certain cities and regions (especially cities of the Nile valley). He suggests that this third issue, the other two being general underdevelopment and resistance to the promotion of family planning, was first recognised later than the first two (as late as the 1970s).
He has surveyed government officials, social workers, doctors in family planning practices, religious leaders, local NGO leaders and the targeted women and discovered issues in each group with family planning but two notable ones. Ironically, since it was apparently a doctor who first noted the problem of overpopulation in Egypt many years ago, today the doctors (in family planning practices, no less) together with religious leaders are the least likely of the groups to regard overpopulation as a problem today. This is ironic, too, as al-Azhar (the greatest Islamic university in the region) issued a fatwa in the 1930s supporting birth control, a fact which appears to have escaped (or perhaps been ignored by) many of those surveyed even among the religious leaders.
More generally (and notably in the ranks of the government but not among social workers or local NGO leaders) apathy and sometimes even hostility toward government policy appeared to be prevalent (while not at the levels described for the doctors and religious leaders). Ibrahim thinks that a degree of buck passing, made possible by a convoluted and opaque government structure, has enabled conservative forces, especially with the assistance of a conservative, possibly Nasserist and poorly trained medical fraternity, to effectively block the provision of family planning advice.
Ibrahim argues that the local NGOs and their leaders as well as women are potentially strong allies of government policy. NGOs in particular, he suggests, need to be given more freedom to act in this area. The women’s main issues were questions of obtaining permission from others to use contraception. Interestingly, a large percentage of women, including a significant percentage of those who said in surveys that they considered contraception was morally wrong, were using contraception. A comparison could probably be made with the circumstances, attitudes and practices of Catholic women over the last half century.
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