Arab Patriotism

The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt

Adam Mestyan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400885312
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

How the support of patriotic sentiments in Ottoman Egypt led to an emerging Arab nationalism Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood.Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestyan investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. He describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House's staging of Verdi's Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the 'Urabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, Mestyan illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East.A wholly original exploration of Egypt in the context of the Ottoman Empire, Arab Patriotism sheds fresh light on the evolving sense of political belonging in the Arab world.

PART I

THE MAKING OF THE KHEDIVATE

I came to Egypt with the sole goal to provide the Vice-Roy with a new sign of my good will and my special affection, and to inspect this so important part of my empire. All my efforts concern the development of the happiness and well-being of all the classes of my subjects. . . . I am convinced that the Vice-Roy proceeds in the same vein, and following the footsteps of his grandfather, the great man of our nation, he will preserve and perfect his work.¹

Thus spoke Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876), through his foreign minister’s French translation, to the consuls and his governor Ismail Pasha in Alexandria in April 1863. This was an extraordinary occasion: no Ottoman sultan had visited the province of Egypt in the three centuries since its conquest by Sultan Selim I in 1517. And in 1863, there were indeed signs of development to be seen in Egypt; Sultan Abdülaziz, for example, traveled by train (for the first time in his life) from Alexandria to Cairo, observed factories, and visited the museum of Egyptology.²

The purpose of this part of the book is to make sense of Egypt’s Ottoman attachment and to contextualize the interaction of imperial and local patriotisms within the Ottoman Empire. We shall follow the story of how Egypt, a quite independent province in the eighteenth century, became re-Ottomanized by the mid-nineteenth century. While “the great man of our nation” (“nation” meaning the empire here), the governor Mehmed Ali has usually been regarded as the ruler who gained “independence,” it fell to his descendants to create a new Ottoman regime-type for the Egyptian province: the khedivate.

¹ Speech cited in letter dated 8 April 1863, from Robert Colquhoun to Foreign Office, FO 78/1754, NA. Gardey, Voyage de Sultan Abd-Ul-Aziz, 42.

² Cevdet, Maʾrūzāt, 57–59. Gardey, Voyage de Sultan Abd-Ul-Aziz, 50; 105–106.

CHAPTER 1

The Ottoman Origins of Arab Patriotism

The construction of a new political community as related to a new regime type in Ottoman Egypt can be defined by two problems in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first was the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its Egyptian province under the rule of Mehmed Ali. The second was the relationship between the governor and the local elites. These problems were interrelated in the legitimacy structure of power, and provided the conditions for the rise of political nation-ness in Arabic.

It was the Crimean war (1853–1856), in which Egypt and other Arab provinces participated, that forcefully brought to the surface patriotism in Arabic as a discursive strategy of constituting political solidarity in public. There were overlapping imagined communities at the imperial and local levels. The idea of the homeland became a means to make sense of new politics through old media: poetry, songs, proverbs, history, and religious treatises. There were new media too, such as the printing press and modern Arabic theater in Ottoman Beirut, which in its inception was connected to solidarity and the Ottoman order.

THE MEHMED ALI PARADOX

There was a drama of survival at the highest level of Ottoman and Egyptian politics. The key to understanding the logic behind the actions of the self-made governor Mehmed Ali and those of his successors is a simple paradox. Mehmed Ali was neither part of the Ottoman elite, nor was he a local Egyptian or even ethnically Arab. He was not sent from the imperial center to govern, nor was he at the head of a local group in the Nile Valley.

Instead, Mehmed Ali arrived in Egypt in 1801 to fight the French, as an ad hoc commander of an irregular unit of the Ottoman army. He was the unruly nephew of the governor in the Ottoman city of Kavala (today in Greece). He invested in the tobacco trade, but soon joined the Ottoman troops en route to Egypt. After the French evacuation, he seized the governorship of the province by deploying mercenaries, scheming, and expelling the appointed Ottoman governors. One governor, Hüsrev, attempted to introduce novel Ottoman reforms (Nizam-i Cedid) much to the chagrin of the sheikhs of al-Azhar. Mehmed Ali commanded the only force capable of maintaining order in Cairo, despite having caused much of the chaos himself. Seeing him as their only means of guarding their financial freedom against Ottoman centralization, the sheikhs made a strategic decision and petitioned the sultan to appoint Mehmed Ali governor. This was a foundational act: lacking an army in Egypt and facing a crisis in Istanbul, the sultan was forced to accede to the request in order to retain the province. The sultanic letter of appointment (a firman) thus arrived in 1805.¹

Over the next twenty years, Mehmed Ali maintained a loyal connection with the weak imperial center while he eliminated his internal rivals, the neo-Mamluks, the local military elite in Egypt. In their place, he built a new elite composed of Ottoman peoples: his family members and friends from Kavala, Turks, Albanians, Armenians, and Greeks from the Ottoman Mediterranean. He employed local Copts and Syrian Christians in the administration. Then, the pasha created a modern army by forced conscription of Egyptian peasants and employed French, Italian, and Spanish training officers. He monopolized the provincial economy. Finally, Mehmed Ali broke al-Azhar by appointing loyal sheikhs as its leaders. The Ottoman Turkish-speaking elite became known by the Turkish word zevat (Arabic dhawāt) in Egypt. The zevat directed his household government and the army.²

Mehmed Ali’s actions were crucially informed by his position as an alien in both the Ottoman elite system and the Egyptian province. He was not, like Ali Pasha in Ottoman Greece, of local origin.³ Aware of precarious position, he always prioritized dealing with the closest threat to his person and rule. Thus, when reforms started in the Ottoman army in the late 1820s, creating the conditions for his removal by force, Mehmed Ali realized his long-cherished plan of acquiring the rich Syrian provinces and gaining more soldiers.⁴ He ordered his eldest son Ibrahim to invade the Syrian provinces in 1831. This move upset the Ottoman system in an unprecedented manner.

THE SYRIAN CAMPAIGN AND IBRAHIM’S IMAGE IN ARABIC, 1830S

There were three important consequences of the Syrian campaign from the point of view of Egypt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Notes on Transliteration, Names, Titles, and Currency
• Introduction
• Part I: The Making of the Khedivate
• Part II: “A Garden with Mellow Fruits of Refinement”
• Part III: The Reinvention of the Khedivate
• Conclusion: The Ottoman Origin of Arab Nationalisms
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Works Cited
• Index