A Generation of Mothers

A particular theme that could be drawn from these political discussions of the Egyptian mentality was a link between the country's 'moral inferiority' and the status of its women. The retarded development of the nation corresponded, it could now be argued, to the retarded development of the Egyptian woman. This was a favourite theme of the British colonial administrators. 'The position of women in Egypt', wrote Lord Cromer, is 'a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of European civilisation.' This civilisation would not succeed, he argued, if 'the position which women occupy in Europe is abstracted from the general plan'.^[69] The 'position' the British had

in mind was that of modern motherhood; for the political and economic transformation of Egypt required a transformation of the household.^[70] If modern political authority was to work through the forming and disciplining of 'character', the individual household, it followed, had to be transformed into a site of this discipline. To this end it was necessary to break down existing patterns of association and segregation, mystified and romanticised under such labels as 'the harem'. 'The unwholesome - and frequently degrading - associations of the old harem life', wrote Cromer's Oriental Secretary Harry Boyle, should 'give place to the healthy and elevating influence of a generation of mothers, keenly alive to their responsibilities as regards the moral training and welfare of their children.'^[71] In such ways political power would hope to penetrate that 'inaccessible' space invisible to 'the observation of the police' and thus commence, recalling a phrase from a previous chapter, to 'work from the inside out'.

The need to open up the inaccessible world of women and thereby produce 'a generation of mothers' was a theme taken up among Egyptian writers, in particular by Qasim Amin, a member of a large landowning family and one of the young government prosecutors employed, like Zaghlul, in the new, Europeanised legal system. If men were to study the situation of women in Egypt, he wrote, as men had already done in Europe, they would find that women are 'the source of their decline and the cause of their ruin'.^[72] Around the turn of the century he published three widely discussed books on this general theme. The first of them, Les égyptiens , published while he was still in his twenties, was written in French as a response to a work by the Duc d'Harcourt that had attacked Britain's claim to be civilising the Egyptians.^[73] The backwardness of the Egyptians, Harcourt had said, was due to certain mental traits that no administrative reforms by the British could ever noticeably alter. These included a submissive character, an insensibility to pain, a habit of dishonesty, and above all an intellectual lethargy that had rendered all Oriental societies immobile, unable to undergo any real historical or political transformation. The ideas, customs, and laws of the Arabs today were just as they had been one thousand years before. This sterility, said Harcourt, was due partly to the stifling effects of climate, but more to the element most uniform throughout the region, Islam. Islamic teachings created a profoundly altered moral sense, which destroyed all intellectual curiosity. So deep and longstanding were these traits that the people with whom one rubbed shoulders in the streets of Cairo differed from the people of France, Harcourt concluded, not only in the dazzling colour of their flowing robes, but in the very nature of the men.^[74]

It was not unusual that an Egyptian writer should reply to these views. What is interesting is the form of the response. Qasim Amin did not question Harcourt's essential distinction between vitality as the characteristic of the

West and the thousand-year immobility of his own country, or the ascription of its causes to certain mental traits. In fact he went further and said that their consequence in present-day Egypt was a condition not just of relative decline, but of 'désorganisation absolue'. He differed with Harcourt by attributing this disorder, as he saw it, and the mental traits that caused it, not to Islam but to the abandoning of Islam. Religion had provided the principles of an order that was now lost. Egypt as a result faced a choice, between attempting to reestablish order by a return to the principles of Islam, and seeking a new basis altogether for social organisation - in the laws and principles of social science. In fact by starting to adopt over the last few decades ideas from contemporary Europe, Egypt seemed already to have chosen the second course. Whatever its merits, the choice had been something inevitable and impossible to resist, he felt, for the movement of European civilisation 'prend partout un caractère envahissant'. Europe's civilisation, he said, was 'la dernière dans l'ordre des civilisations' and possessed 'un caractère de longevité, j'allais dire d'irrévocabilité'.^[75]

The end was to overcome the state of 'absolute disorganisation', which was to be done by making social science the new organising principle of society. This gave a new extent to the country's need for scientific knowledge. How in practice could this political need be met? The old method, sending a cadre of students to Europe to acquire and bring back science, would not be sufficient. One solution was to be the building in Egypt of a national university to produce an educated elite at home. But Qasim Amin began by proposing the formation of something far larger than an intelligentsia: an educated Egyptian motherhood. 'Je suis partisan absolue', he announced in Les égyptiens , 'd'une instruction relative pour les femmes.' Dismissing Harcourt's fanciful accounts of harems and eunuchs, Qasim Amin explained that within the Egyptian home it was women and not men who held power. It was this power that was to be engaged, in order to establish science as society's principle of order. Education must be given to girls, he said, to enable them as mothers to offer scientific answers to the eternal questioning of their children.^[76] As he argued repeatedly in his subsequent writings, the process of creating a modern political order was to begin on the mother's knee.

Writings of this kind sought to isolate women as the locus of the country's backwardness. They were the holders of a power that was to be broken up by the new policies of the state, transformed into a means of social and political discipline. The family was to be organised as this house of discipline, which would then be able to produce, alongside the schools, the military and the other practices I have mentioned, the proper 'mentality' of the Egyptian - upon which the very possibility of a social order was understood to depend.

I now want to return to this question of the social order. Like the notion of mind or mentality, the social order was an abstraction. Like the mind, it indicated a mental or conceptual realm existing apart from the visible world of 'mere things' - the realm of order or structure. Discussing the army, model housing and the school in chapters 2 and 3, I suggested that the new methods of discipline and distribution in each case produced this sort of effect of a non-physical structure existing apart from things in themselves. Thus in the military, for instance, the coordination and control of men made an army seem like a machine, something more than the sum of its parts. The appearance of the military as a machine made the absence of such a structure in old armies suddenly visible; old armies now seemed like 'a crowd in a place of diversion'. Similarly, as we saw, the methods of discipline in the modern school made it suddenly possible to talk of the 'chaos' and the 'brouhaha' of the teaching mosque. Once the same methods of coordination and control were envisaged for the civilian and the city, existing cities in the same way suddenly appeared filled with the crowd. In terms of the new perception of the crowd one encounters the same sudden discovery of the problem of a social order.

The Problem of Society

The question of the crowd has already been mentioned in Egyptian accounts of journeys to Europe. What was remarkable about Paris or Marseilles was not only the layout of the buildings and the shops but the disciplined, industrious manner of the individual in the busy streets. 'Each person was occupied with his own business, proceeding on his way, taking care not to harm or interfere with anyone else.' Such descriptions are reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's 'Man in the crowd', who observed from his café window how 'by far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied, businesslike demeanour, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on.'^[77] The crowd in the street, in fact, became a common topos in both Western and Egyptian writing. 'No subject', observed Benjamin, 'was more entitled to the attentions of nineteenth-century writers.'^[78]

The crowd in the city's streets was the theme in a work of fiction that appeared in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century. Like the works I examined in earlier chapters, the story was written in the form of a journey. But although its protagonists eventually find themselves in Paris (travelling there, I should add, to see the Exposition Universelle of 1900), for the first time in a work of modern Egyptian fiction the major events are set not in

Europe but in Cairo. The two protagonists, a young writer named Isa ibn Hisham and his elderly and respectable companion, the Pasha, are jostled by crowds from the very start of their journey. They meet in one of the cemeteries outside Cairo, where the Pasha, who lived in Cairo fifty years before, has returned from the dead to discover with shock and confusion what has happened to the city since. As they set off into the city, a donkey driver tries to cheat the Pasha over the payment of a fare and an argument breaks out. The Pasha calls the donkey driver an 'insolent peasant'. He in turn warns the Pasha 'we are in an age of liberty, and there is no distinction between the donkey driver and the prince'. Around them, we are told, a crowd has already formed. A policeman arrives, more interested in a bribe than in 'preserving order,' and marches the Pasha off to the police station. They are accompanied, the author adds, by the enormous crowd.^[79]

In subsequent chapters the two characters journey through the modern streets of Cairo and the new spaces of its public life. They find themselves in the court house and the gaol, the hotel and the restaurant, theatres and dance halls, bars, cafés and brothels, accompanied throughout by the restless, noisy crowd. 'What is this enormous commotion?' asks the Pasha on one occasion, as they walk during the evening in the centre of the city, ' ... this cleaving multitude, this crowd?' He supposes there must be some fantastic feast or funeral. 'No,' answers Isa ibn Hisham, 'just people congregating in public - companions spending an evening together and drinkers getting drunk.'^[80]

This combination of the unruly commotion of life and the absence of all moral and political discipline repeats itself in almost every episode of the novel. The crowd is encountered not only in the brothel and the café but even at the final place they visit on their journey, the theatre. The theatre in Europe (a companion explains to the Pasha) is a place where people's morals are refined, by the portrayal of their history and other themes in dramatic form. Here it was very different. The actors danced, shouted, and caroused on stage, and the audience, composed of people from every class, did not sit silently like Europeans, as spectators, but joined in, laughing and applauding as a raucous crowd.^[81]

The Tale of Isa ibn Hisham , as the book was called, was described by later writers as the most important work of imaginative literature of its generation.^[82] It was very widely read. An expurgated version was later used by the Ministry of Education, as a text in all government secondary schools.^[83] It has been interpreted as a work of social criticism that expresses the liberalism which emerged in the political thought of the period. The term liberalism tends to be misleading. The donkey driver's statement about an age of liberty has been cited to illustrate a major theme of the book, that Egyptians must be taught the principle of equality before the law.^[84] But these words

come from the mouth of an insolent peasant. The concern of the book is not with equality of rights but with social chaos, a chaos suddenly visible in the indiscipline of the city's streets where the peasant behaves as an equal of the Pasha. Indiscipline is not usually considered a central concern of liberal thought, but rather than abandoning the label of liberalism I would prefer to use these writings from Egypt to understand liberalism in its colonial context. Egyptian liberalism spoke about justice and legal rights; but these concerns were contained within a wider problematic. Rights could only be enjoyed within a society of obedient and industrious individuals, and it was these characteristics, as we have seen, that Egyptians now suddenly seemed to lack. Liberalism was the language of a new social class, threatened by the absence of the mental habits of industry and obedience which would make possible a social order. The Tale of Isa ibn Hisham articulated the political fears of this class.

The novel was written by the thirty-year-old Muhammad al-Muwailihi and published between 1898 and 1902 in Misbah al-Sharq , a paper founded and edited by his father. The father was a member of a leading merchant household of Cairo, the Egyptian branch of a wealthy textile-trading family from the Hejaz (the Red Sea coast of Arabia). The history of the family is worth mentioning, for it illustrates the fortunes of this mercantile class. The Muwailihi's had grown prosperous in the eighteenth century with the prosperity of Egypt's Red Sea trade, and in the nineteenth century had become close political allies of the Egyptian ruling family. Such alliances, however, were unable to secure the country's large merchant families against the expansion of European commerce. In the 1870s, after being rescued from commercial ruin by the Khedive, the Muwailihi's were among those who led the nationalist opposition to Egypt's commercial and financial control by the European powers.^[85] By the 1890s the son was employed as a government official under the British, who had responded to the nationalist uprising in 1882 by placing the country under military occupation.

Muhammad al-Muwailihi wrote Isa ibn Hisham at the same time as two influential friends of his own age, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, were writing the similar works of social criticism I have already mentioned, one describing the country's condition as a state of absolute disorganisation, the other as part of a universal social crisis.^[86] The three men were all members of the same social and literary salon, where they mixed with fellow government servants, magistrates, and prosecuters, with members of some of the country's important Turkish families, with British officials, and with visiting Orientalist scholars.^[87] The concern among those who gathered in such salons towards the end of the nineteenth century was not so much the colonial occupation, from which as landowners, merchants and government officials their families were beginning to benefit even as they resented the

fact of European control, but the crowd that threatened in the streets and cafés outside.