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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
3. The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness
The Egyptian Case
Gabriel Piterberg
| For me, a child of a successful anti-colonial struggle, Orientalism was a book which talked of things I felt I had known all along but had never found the language to formulate with clarity. Like many great books, it seemed to say for the first time what one had always wanted to say. The force of the argument made its impact in the first few pages, and halfway through the book I found my thoughts straying beyond the confines of Said's discussion. I was struck by the way Orientalism was implicated in the construction of not only the ideology of British colonialism which had dominated India for two centuries, but also of the nationalism which was my own heritage. Orientalist constructions of Indian civilization had been avidly seized upon by the ideologues of Indian nationalism in order to assert the glory and antiquity of a national past. So Indian nationalists had accepted the colonialist critique of the Indian present: a society fallen into barbarism and stagnation, incapable of progress and modernity. |
| --Partha Chatterjee, "Their Own Words? An Essay for Edward Said" |
This article is the product of my interest in the relationship between modern historiography and nationalism and more generally, in the construction of narratives of identity in modernity. The topic discussed here is the perplexing, yet patently evident, presence of the Orientalist discourse 1 in non-European nationalist historiographies. Modern Egyptian historiography is examined as a case study. The morphology and function of Orientalism in the construction of a national-territorial narrative are considered with regard to the representations of a specific referent: Ottoman Egypt in particular, and the Ottoman Empire and its rule over the Arab Middle East in general. Two sorts of texts are read: works by professional historians, and school textbooks used for the teaching of national history and civic studies.
On the basis of this reading, I put forth the following argument: (1) In terms of morphology, Egyptian historiography adopted, lock, stock and barrel, the Orientalist narrative of the "decline" and "stagnation" of the Ottoman Empire and its provincial rule from the middle of sixteenth century on, with special emphasis on the year 1798 as the turning-point in modern Middle Eastern and Egyptian history. (2) In terms of function, the Orientalist discourse underlies the portrayal of a stereotypical--and foreign--ancien régime, on the ruins of which the dormant nation emerges as congruent with modernity and as a modernizing force. Put differently, the Orientalist discourse underlies the familiar nationalist narrative of the protagonist (the nation) that transfers itself from stagnation and medieval slumber into awakening and modernity.
Before proceeding with the case study, I wish to set forth the basic components that stimulate my reading of nationalist historiography, and situate this reading within the context of a larger debate within the social sciences on the nature of modernity; though of pivotal importance, nationalism is only a constituent part in this debate.
The framework within which I read nationalist historiography is an attempt to amalgamate Hayden White's understanding of modern historiography and Benedict Anderson's understanding of modern nationalism, or, to be more precise, modern "nation-ness." 3 What makes this amalgam possible--and from my perspective, appealing--is the fact that both White and Anderson challenge, in a radical and fundamental fashion, the most persistent orthodoxy in the social and human sciences. Their challenge is accompanied by the alternatives they offer; these pertain to different issues but are philosophically analogous.
Instead of labeling the orthodox paradigm I prefer to identify it by its underlying premise, namely, dichotomism. According to this premise the human world, especially in the age of modernity, can be observed and explained through a prism that consists of a series of analogous dichotomies: objective/ subjective, reality/language, material/ideal (or ideological), content/form, West/East, society/state, history/myth (or fiction), and more. In the last two decades this dichotomism has been acutely undermined by sev eral scholars who, each taking on a polarity pertinent to her/his interest, have, in effect, deconstructed these allegedly timeless truths by showing that they are historical and discursive. Peter Novick's work on the concept of objectivity in American historiography is a good example of the critical power of rendering historical something that is constructed as eternally valid.
A more explicit deconstruction of dichotomism in a particular context is Timothy Mitchell's work on the phenomenology of the modern state and its appearance in the Middle East. 6 Tackling the state/society dichotomy, Mitchell perceptively notes, first, that debates among different schools in conventional political science have always remained within the confines of dichotomism: society is always grasped as an objective content and the state as a subjective form, and the main endeavor is to arrive at a finite definition of the elusive line that separates state and society. Mitchell then argues that the modern state is not a found entity, unproblematically distinguishable from society but an assembly of social practices that, through various means and technologies, appear to constitute an entity that is external to society. The modern state, in Mitchell's words, is a "discursively produced effect."
Mitchell's approach undermines this particular dichotomy by radically altering questions and categories. The latter are no longer two entities, occupying spaces the boundaries between which must be identified, but social and other practices. The focus is the historical processes through which some of these practices are constructed as "the state"; and the question of whether the state is "real" ceases to be interesting. "Real" is no longer posited as a dichotomous opposite to "fabricated."
White and Anderson do something rather similar. White's work on the narrative in modern European historiography is a complex undertaking that I cannot seriously claim to discuss here. I focus on the two pairs of related dichotomies that White deconstructs: content/form and history/literature (especially the modern novel). Orthodox scholarship reads the historical narrative on the basis of two assumptions. One, termed by White coherence, presupposes that past reality offers itself in coherent structures. According to the other assumption, correspondence in White's terminology, the narrative is seen as an indifferent form that, if competently written, merely mimics the content of its referent, that is, the coherent way in which historical reality already offers itself.
On the basis of these two assumptions a twofold dichotomy is then drawn: between a content (which is self-offered) and a form (which is transparent and merely mimics what is already offered by the content); and between the imaginary narrative and the historical narrative. It implies, White contends, "that the form in which historical events present themselves to a prospective narrator are found rather than constructed." 8 Moreover, the form of the historical narrative "adds nothing to the content of the representation." 9 White's fun damental rejection of this double dichotomy is premised on the view that reality as it occurs is formless and meaningless, and that making a narrative sense of it is a product of human consciousness expressed in a certain form of language. It follows that the representation of a past reality through a historical narrative is not an indifferent form, which, at best, is an adequate mimesis of how the content offers itself, but a form that constitutes content and is indistinguishable from it. 10
The twin dichotomy of content/form is that between history and fictional literature, especially the kinds of literature that employ narrative discourse (the modern novel and the epic are good examples). The proponents of this dichotomy base it on the argument that the contents are dichotomous: the historical narrative refers to events that really happened whereas fictional literature's referents are imagined or invented events. In the historical narrative, therefore, form need not seriously influence the truthful and realistic reflection of its subject matter. Language is transparent. White undermines this in two ways. First, he convincingly shows that when the reader comprehends the meaning produced by a historical narrative, his/her comprehension depends on the recognition of the narrative's form as much as it does on its content; further, in this process of comprehension the content and the form are inseparable. 11 Second, White renders historical the dichotomous pair. He shows that the premise by which historical discourse need not, and should not, resort to any literary strategies in order to reflect truthfully and realistically its subject matter has a history and a context. It was part of the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century, and ought to be set against the ideological and political controversies in that period about the upheavals of the French Revolution, and who and what caused them. 12
Since the publication of the first edition of his Imagined Communities in 1983, the impact of Benedict Anderson on the study of nationalism has been, paradoxically, immense and limited. 13 As Alon Confino puts it: "Since 1983 Anderson's fascinating notion of the nation as an imagined community has become a household term in the way we think and talk about nationalism; but we still await a study that explores the process--social, political and cultural--by which people come to imagine a distinct nation." 14 There are, I think, three reasons for this perplexing paradox. The first is the nature of Anderson's work: it has tremendous explanatory force and a host of stimulating ideas but, at the same time, it does not easily lend itself to direct and specific applications as, for instance, White's concept of historiography or Weber's of bureaucracy do. Second, the two chapters that are of a more applicable nature have appeared relatively recently, in the revised edition (1991). 15 The third reason is the reluctance of historians in particular--for historians are the chief suppliers of case studies--seriously to consider theoretical issues as part and parcel of their applied work, in a manner that is neither instrumental nor eclectic. The consequence of all this is that in many studies of particular nationalisms we find openings that praise Anderson's "apt coinage" or "refreshing concept;" there, however, the mutual relevance between Anderson's model and a given nationalism abruptly ends.
What has gone largely unnoticed in Anderson's concept is its potential to transform the debate over the modern nation in a radical fashion. This radical transformation is, in my understanding, analogous to those put forth by Mitchell and White with regard to the modern state and modern historiography respectively: Anderson acutely undermines yet another variant that comprises the paradigm of dichotomism.
The point can be clarified through a common and well-known classification of the scholarship on nationalism offered by Anthony Smith. He identifies two types of scholars: modernists and primordialists. 16 Smith's discussion on these approaches to nationalism reveals two things. One is that the debate safely remains within the confines of dichotomism: the polarity is essentially whether modern nations are "really real" and genuine collectives, with empirically verifiable premodern lineages, roots, and origins, as the primordialists--and, albeit more crudely, the nationalists themselves--say; or whether they are strictly modern creatures, with an invented, falsified, or fabricated (according to taste) genesis in the past as the modernists maintain. The other thing is that Smith's reference to Anderson as one of the two most important proponents of the modernist school (the other being Gellner) is typical of the way in which the radical potential in Anderson's work is time and again overlooked if not missed altogether. 17
True, within the confines of a dichotomistic discourse it is fairly reasonable to understand Anderson's approach as modernist. The point is that the concept of imagined communities transcends the premordialist/modernist polarity, in the same way as Mitchell's concept of the modern state as a "discursively produced effect" transcends the state/society polarity. Anderson himself, in the revised edition (1991), seems to be aware that his approach is fundamentally different. 18 The radical potential, however, already exists in the original edition (1983), and it lies in Anderson's disagreement with Gellner and his insistence on the nation as an imagined rather than invented community. It is quite puzzling that Smith, while unproblematically attaching Gellner and Anderson to the same "school," fails to see the significance of the following passage:
| With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point [comparable to Renan's] when he rules that "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist." The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates "invention" to "fabrication" and "falsity," rather than to "imagining" and "creation." In this way he implies that "true" communities can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact . . . are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined [emphasis in original]. 19 |
Anderson not only casts aside the above polarity, he also makes it clear that in his model "imagined" should not be construed as dichotomous to "real." The modern nation (and any other large form of collectivity for that matter) is inseparably and simultaneously imagined and real: it has to be imagined because it is not a tangible thing and because all of its members will never meet each other; it is at the same time real because, paradoxical as it may seem, the imagining is real, that is, most people really think and act as members of nations. Consciousness itself, once adopted, circulated, and reproduced, becomes a "real fact."
There is another way in which Anderson's work is capable of transforming our understanding of nationalism: the fact that it tries to disentangle what can be termed nationalism's black box, that is, the cultural process in which people come to make a nationalist sense of themselves and the world around them. This unraveling of the sense of nationness starts from Anderson's explicit view that the nationalism is first and foremost a "cultural artefact." 20
The significance of the emphasis Anderson lays on nationalism as a cultural sense-making phenomenon may be better appreciated through another analogy. The impact that Anderson's cultural emphasis may have on the study of nationalism resembles the impact on the study of ideology that Clifford Geertz's famous essay had more than twenty years ago. 21 What seemed to have motivated Geertz to apply his general model of culture to the concept of ideology was the inadequacy of the then prevailing theories: the Marxist (the interest theory in Geertz's terminology) and the Behaviorist (the strain theory). The former viewed ideology as a reflection and reproduction of class interests, whereas for the latter ideology was functional in managing and alleviating modernity's strain. While these theories are not without merits, they have a fundamental flaw that Geertz perceptively pointed out: they go from what might be the source of ideology (Marxism) to what might be its effect (Behaviorism), and the complicated process, cultural in essence, of the production of meaning (i.e., ideology itself), is left idle like an unopened black box. Be the merits and demerits of Geertz's approach what they may, its great contribution has been in drawing attention to the ignored process of cultural signification. The analogy between Geertz's and Anderson's insights may be more than coincidental, for both approach their respective topics--ideology and nationalism--from the vantage point of sociocultural anthropology. 22
This section is concerned with the representation of a certain portion of Egypt's past, the Ottoman portion, in a host of modern Egyptian historical texts. These comprise works by professional historians, as well as three textbooks selected from the project entitled al-Tarbiyya al-Wataniyya. Though the corpus under consideration may not be a perfect reflection of Egyptian nationalist historiography from the 1920s on, it is sufficiently substantial to sustain the chief argument I put forth. 23
Despite the fact that I have intentionally selected texts from different historiographic generations, texts that reflect varied interests and views, their representations of the Ottoman Empire, its Arabic-speaking provinces, and Ottoman Egypt in particular have several fundamental features; it might even be tentatively suggested that these historical representations constitute a uniform approach. The uniformity of this corpus stems from the fact that its constituent parts display a simultaneous and perhaps unselfconscious acceptance of two powerful discourses: the Orientalist and that of territorial Egyptian nationness as it was shaped in the 1920s. What these two discourses have in common is a cultural-essentialist perception of history, and strong, at times vitriolic, anti-Ottoman judgments and views.
The emphasis laid on the territorial nationalist discourse requires some explanation. The most authoritative works on the history of nationalist culture in Egypt, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, identify at least two, possibly three competing nationalist discourses: the Egyptianist-Pharaonic and the Islamic-Arab; 24 to these it is possible to add, as Ursula Wokoeck does, the radical Islamic discourse. 25 Moreover, according to Gershoni and Jankowski, whereas the Egyptianist concept prevailed until roughly the early 1930s, it was gradually marginalized by its Islamic-Arab challenger (which became more Arab than Islamic) from the mid-1930s and thereafter. 26
I do not wish to contest this thesis, supported as it is by impressive and varied data. My point of departure is, however, somewhat different. My reading of nationalist historiography ought to be placed within the context offered by Sami Zubaida and Roger Owen. 27 Separately but in a related way, they argue that from the 1920s on the "colonial state," later the territorial nation-state, became the most irreducibly basic unit in the Middle East in terms of both politics and what Edward Said terms "identitarian thought." 28 According to Zubaida and Owen, the modern state and the territorial nation as an imagined community created a new and different "political field," under the rules of which politics--including the politics of collective identity--had to be played. What this means, as Zubaida in particular argues convincingly, is not that radical Islam or Arabism were meaningless alternatives to, say, Egyptian Pharaonism, but rather that their imaginings too were subordinated to the model of the territorial nation. This perspective, I
Thethink, does not contradict the Gershoni-Jankowski thesis of two national cultures; it simply sees them as two discourses that contest the power to shape Egyptian nationness.
The texts in question being historical, I shall examine first the representation of time, where the Orientalist discourse is emphasized; then the representation of space and subject, where the Egyptian nationalist discourse is evident; and, finally, the explicit and formal explanations these texts offer. The neat attribution of one discourse to one dimension is obviously dictated by analytical convenience and clarity of presentation.
The temporal definition of a historical topic, "periodization" in the professional jargon, evinces the historian's interpretation and sometimes may even surrender her/his worldview. In our case the periodization touches upon what since the 1970s has become an intensely debated bone of contention in Middle East studies, namely, the beginning of the modern era in the region's history.
The position of the Egyptian historians on this issue is decisive, and justifies a view of them as, to use the late Albert Hourani's formulation, "Near Eastern historians looking at themselves with eyes given their direction by the West." Clearly implying adherence to the Orientalist discourse, their position is that the year 1798, in which Bonaparte invaded Egypt, erected a barrier between the eighteenth century and the Ottoman period in general on the one hand, and the nineteenth century on the other.
For Shafiq Ghurbal, the doyen of twentieth-century Egyptian historiography, the five centuries that preceded the French invasion are not worthy of serious consideration. In the preface to his published Masters thesis, The Beginning of the Egyptian Question (1928), Ghurbal declares that the nineteenth century opened a new era in the history of the Middle East and Egypt in particular. The Westernization of the East was, according to Ghurbal, the history of the nineteenth century. In this process the French invasion was a hallmark, and the intervention and cultural influence of the West played a major role. Indicative in this respect is the citation with which Ghurbal opens his Preface: " 'L'Organisation de l'Orient,' wrote M. Lavisse, 'est en somme, la fait capital de la periode moderne.'" 29
Though a detailed analysis of Ghurbal's historiography cannot be ventured here, it should be pointed out that he most probably absorbed the Orientalist discourse through his supervisor at the University of London, Arnold Toynbee. Consider for instance the following short passage from Toynbee's forward to Ghurbal's book. In it Toynbee illustrates his version of the "Occident-Orient" encounter, as it was embodied in the Mamluk beys riding to intercept the French force in the summer of 1798:
| and they encountered not men (as human capacity was conceived of by Orientals in 1798), but creatures armed with all the incomprehensible and irresistible powers of Mr. Well's 'Martians.' At the first onset, these Occidental 'Martians' carried all before them, and Oriental mankind was stunned. Egypt became a battleground on which superhuman Frenchmen and superhuman Englishmen fought one another." 30 |
One of Ghurbal's outstanding disciples, Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal, further reinforces the acceptance of Orientalism in the discourse of modern Egyptian historiography. He contributes to this discourse the term "rukud" (stagnation), as something that incarnates and sums up what is for him three centuries of Egyptian history under Ottoman yoke. 31 The original feature in al-Shayyal's work that reveals how Orientalism and territorial nationalism are inextricably intertwined is his thesis of al-nahda al-tilqa'iyya (the spontaneous awakening). This awakening, al-Shayyal observes, occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century and was authentically Egyptian, innocent of either Eastern or Western influence. The interesting point for the present discussion is, however, al-Shayyal's assertion that the casting aside of this authentically Egyptian awakening by what he calls "the movement of translation and imitation in the nineteenth century" was not only inevitable but desirable. 32 The reason for which "the spontaneous awakening" was bound to come to a halt, al-Shayyal explains, was that the French introduced in Egypt "Manifestations of a scientific awak ening that were in fundamental contrast to those of the Egyptian awakening in every field" (note how through the same word--nahda--modernization and nationalism are rendered two analogous parts of the same whole). The result was that Egyptian scholars "began to compare the knowledge they possessed with that possessed by these Frenchmen." The imprint left on Egypt by the French expedition, al-Shayyal concludes, was ineradicable. Therefore, the reforms Muhammad 'Ali Pasha carried out "required the imitation of the West, if Egypt desired a real awakening, [one] that would conform with the [awakening] in the world." 33
Al-Shayyal's colleague, Ahmad 'Izzat 'Abd al-Karim, reiterates the Orientalist notion, argued as it is on a cultural-essentialist premise, that the nineteenth century marked an abrupt change, but does so in a more narrowly defined context. He contributed an essay that forwards al-Shayyal's book on Egyptian historiography in the nineteenth century. Concentrating on the great historian 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti and entitled "The Historical Writing at the End of the Eighteenth Century," the essay is thus concluded by 'Abd al-Karim:
| It is therefore evident that we see in al-Jabarti the last disciple of the school of Muslim historians in the Middle Ages, and we do not see in him the first disciple of the nineteenth century school. For Egypt of the nineteenth century was something different, which al-Jabarti did not know, and had he known he would not have understood it. The fact that culture was to be developed in Egypt by those who desired renovation . . . was inevitable. The [historical] writing of the nineteenth century drew the sources of its formation from this general cultural awakening. 34 |
The work of Muhammad Anis is particularly significant to my tentative argument that at least with regard to the Ottoman past the approach of modern Egyptian historiography shows uniformity, and that this uniformity consists of the Orientalist and territorial nationalist discourses. The significance lies in the fact that in almost any classification of Egyptian historians Anis would not be classified with those I have thus far discussed. He is not a disciple of Ghurbal's, he belongs to a later generational group, he propagated the use of scientific socialism and dialectic materialism (as distinguished from Ghurbal's diplomatic historiography or Shayyal's adherence to the "old" history of ideas and culture), and ideologically he was a Nasserite. 35 To return to the Gershoni-Jankowski thesis, Anis should have been a clear proponent of the secular Arab alternative; as I will show, however, he abides by the discourse as it was shaped by Ghurbal and al-Shayyal.
The first thing to note is that Anis dedicates his book on the Ottoman period "ila faqid al-ta'rikh al-'Arabi al-hadith ustadhina Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal." 36 More important, like Ghurbal, al-Shayyal, 'Abd al-Karim, and others, he draws a clear line between two periods. The first, from the Ottoman conquest in 1517 to the eighteenth century, he identifies by the term "iflas," that is, the bankruptcy of the Ottoman system at the center and in the Arab provinces. The second period is characterized by Anis as the era of al-ittijahat al-jadida (the new orientations) that spread throughout the Middle East: Muhammad 'Ali's reforms and--fantastic as it may seem--the Wahhabiyya in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the inception of Arab and Turkish nationalisms in the second half. 37
Though the formal explanations offered by the historians will be presented later, it seems necessary to comment here on how the periodization is justified. This justification brings to the fore a fundamental Orientalist premise embedded in the discussion hitherto: the superiority of "Western culture" and its sine qua non status for generating change in a stagnant society. In this respect the historiographic discourse considered here is not only uniform but unanimous.
Al-Shayyal for instance, in order to account for the alleged rukud, quotes lengthy passages extracted from Ghurbal's preface to the book The Islamic East written by another colleague, Husayn Mu'nis. One of these passages, underlined in al-Shayyal's own text, reads as follows: "The stagnation stemmed from the fact that the Ottoman force doubtless prevented the contact of the peoples of the [Ottoman] state with foreign cultures in general . . . and European culture in particular." 38 Anis offers a similar argument. The isolation imposed on Egyptian society, he explains, "turned Egypt--indeed the whole Arab East--into a stagnant region [mintaqa rakida] which was not affected by the cultural developments undergone by Europe from the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution." 39
Abd al-Rahman 'Abd al-Rahim also accepts this periodization and justification. His case is interesting for two reasons. One is that the work by 'Abd al-Rahim referred to here was published relatively late (1977). Another reason is that 'Abd al-Rahim is a socioeconomic historian, and socioeconomic history is a scholarly quarter out of which emanated most serious doubts about the validity of the 1798 narrative; further, and in a clearer way than any of the historians mentioned thus far, his specialized topic is Ottoman Egypt in the eighteenth century. Yet 'Abd al-Rahim, perhaps even more blatantly than his colleagues, sees nothing but decay, stagnation, and exploitation in the pre-1798 period. For him, as for so many Orientalists, the accounts of European travelers (the famous Volney in this case) are authoritative reflections of socioeconomic realities. 40 In his summary of how Egypt was socially and economically affected by Ottoman rule, the social domain is thus portrayed as follows by 'Abd al-Rahim:
| This was [then] the social situation under Ottoman rule which went from bad to worse. A comprehensive change had to be found. But things remained as they had been until the arrival of the French expedition (1798). A new page was then opened in the history of modern Egypt. 41 |
While the representation of time reveals the uniformity with which the Egyptian historical texts follow the Orientalist discourse, the representation of space and subject brings to the fore the acute impact on this historiography of another discourse: territorial Egyptian nationness as it was shaped between the 1890s and the 1920s. 42 The crux of this discourse's impact is what might be called the "Misrification" [tamsir in Arabic] of space and subject. It is in this dimension that the writing of "Egypt" as a modern historical subject comes to the fore in a concrete, tangible fashion.
At a more general level this phenomenon corresponds with a key argument through which Anderson understands the nation as an imagined community. He perceptively notices several related processes from the sixteenth century on, which resulted in a major metamorphosis in the conception of time and space. The gist of it was that time came to be conceived of as empty, homogeneous, and simultaneous. Nationalism as cultural artefact is one, albeit central, derivative of this metamorphosis. Further, a nationalist mode of collective imagining is possible only within this sort of time conception, for it facilitates the nation's representation as a sociological-organic essence that floats in its territory in an empty, homogeneous time and manifests itself in a variety of ways. 43
The process of the Misrification of space and subject correlates with one of several possible classifications of twentieth-century Egyptian historians. 44 The criterion adopted by this particular classification is the nature of the protagonist each group of historians selected as its subject. For the first group, best represented by Ghurbal, the protagonist was the dawla (dynastic state) and its enterprising and determined ruler. Its proponents wrote political-diplomatic history, desired that Egypt would become a member in the community of nation-states as an independent state led by the Muhammad 'Ali dynasty, and that it would adopt Western culture so as to become part thereof. This is well illustrated by Ghurbal's work mentioned earlier, The Beginning of the Egyptian Question and the Rise of Mehmet Ali (1928), a work whose title surrenders its central thesis. For if the French invasion and, more important, Muhammad 'Ali Pasha's enter prising rule founded a separate Egyptian political entity, then it was only natural that such an entity should have had distinct political and diplomatic concerns. Thus the Eastern question, at the center of which stood the Ottoman Empire as a whole, is Misrified by Ghurbal.
The second group comprises Ghurbal students, among them al-Shayyal, Mu'nis, and 'Abd al-Karim. The major change they introduced was the shift of the protagonist from dawla to sha'b (people). By sha'b it was not meant that historiographic emphasis had to be laid on the wider strata of society instead of the elite, the ruler and his household. Rather, it was sha'b in the sense of a collective whose long, incessant interaction with its geopolitical and climatic environment had distilled an organic-territorial nation. Henceforth other types of protagonists of a similar vein appeared: al-shakhsiyya al-Misriyya (the Egyptian personality), al-hadara al-Misriyya (Egyptian civilization), al-thaqafa al-Misriyya (Egyptian culture), and so on.
Al-Shayyal, for example, contends that Egypt's location on the junction of three continents, its eternal river, creative inhabitants, and florescent culture had distilled an Egyptian personality that "preserved its independence and distinctiveness throughout history." 45 Particularly telling is what according to al-Shayyal the Egyptians could turn to in a dire circumstance such as the "nadir" of Ottoman rule:
| But at that point something was [found] which Egyptians had not forsaken for generations, and this was their consciousness of themselves and their country, Egypt [shu'urahum bi-anfusihim wa bi-biladihim Misr]. This consciousness left its trace on Egypt's cultural life, for Egyptians always turned to their very own history, rulers, 'ulama, cities, temples, Nile, festivities and so forth. And from this enduring effort we have gained the chain of khittat and history books which it contains. It commences with the writing of Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam on the conquest of Egypt and ends with 'Ali Mubarak's Khittat al-Tawfiqiyya, Amin Sami's Taqwim al-Nil and 'Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi'i's Ta'rikh al-Haraka al-Qawmiyya. 46 |
An important comment must be made on al-Shayyal's passage. It will be recalled that the passage is extracted from the elaboration of his "spontaneous awakening" thesis alluded to earlier, which occurred in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the nadir of Ottoman yoke. This passage is, I think, a perfect example of the nation as an organic essence that floats in an empty, homogeneous time, from an immemorial past to the present and thence will continue to float ad infinitum. Second, consider the sentence around which the whole passage is constructed, that the Egyptians, whenever they found themselves in dire circumstances always turned to shu'urahum bi-anfusihim wa bi-biladihim Misr. This sentence, indeed the whole passage, could have been neatly inserted into Renan's famous lecture "What is a nation?" There may be, in other words, what might be called a "grammar" that underpins all modern, nationalist historiography. The following short passage from Renan's text illustrates this basic grammar, for it shows that Renan's imagining of the nation in general and al-Shayyal's imagining of a particular nation are in principle identical:
| A nation is a soul, spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent . . . the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion. 47 |
The third group in the classification employed here is one under the roof of which reside, not unproblematically, both socialist and Arab nationalist tendencies. My point concerning this group, as was shown in the discussion on the periodization and will be further shown with regard to the formal explanations, is that in this case also the territorial nation-based discourse prevails. Historians of this group stress the centrality of social and economic processes at the expense of other protagonists, outstanding personalities first and foremost; they also pay much attention to the lower classes--the peasants and urban masses. My point is borne out by the new protagonists introduced by the historians who fall into this group. These widen the social scope of a horizontally imagined community in the historiographic discourse: this "horizontality" means that the peasants embody the national communion no less than Muhammad 'Ali or al-Shayyal's champions of Egyptian culture. The widening of the imagined community does not mean, however, that the hegemony of territorial-nationalist discourse is broken, for all these new protagonists share a common feature with their predecessors--they are all Misrified.
Thus in Anis's work on the Ottoman period al-mujtama' al-Misri (Egyptian society) becomes a meaningful subject. Anis explains, for instance, that Jabarti's distinction as a historian, to the extent he cannot be compared to his contemporaries, stems from the fact that Jabarti "gives a comprehensive description of Egyptian society during the Ottoman period," whereas the works of his contemporaries are confined to the traditional elites. 48 The same is true for the term "al-iqtisad al-Misri" (the Egyptian economy). 49 The clearest evidence for my observation is 'Abd al-Rahim's concise structuring of the society in eighteenth-centu ry Ottoman Egypt. This structural depiction appears as a statement of fact, and class and national criteria are woven together in it. Most significantly, the latter criterion overwhelms the former: "Society became one of classes; there was, first, the class of Ottoman rulers, then the Mamluks and finally the Egyptian people, among whom both rich and poor could be found." 50
An examination of the formal explanations offered for the Ottoman rukud by three historians--Ghurbal, al-Shayyal, and Anis--brings us back to Orientalism. These explanations adhere to Orientalist fundamentals in two ways: in all of them the empire is grasped as a monolithic, self-contained entity embodied in the term al-Dawla al-'Uthmaniyya; all are cultural-essentialist explanations that at times resort to characterizations of mind and mentality.
The explanation of Ghurbal and al-Shayyal for the alleged rukud is one and the same for a prosaic reason: as mentioned earlier, seeking to account for the stagnation, al-Shayyal inserts a long quotation of Ghurbal's preface to Husayn Mu'nis's book, and confirms that this is the quotation's function. 51 In the first reason of his explanatory scheme Ghurbal resorts to cultural-mental argumentation. He asserts that the rukud stemmed from the fact that "the Ottoman rulers were of a qawm which in its nature was inclined to conservatism. The Ottomans did not consist of one qawm. Ottomanism was nothing but a criterion for belonging to the ruling elite." 52 I should note here that as the internal logic of Ghurbal's argument is rather vague (was Ottomanism the essence of a ruling class or something else?), it is difficult to ascertain what he means by qawm in this particular context.
Ghurbal's recommendation for how the East ought to have extricated itself from its stagnant predicament is strikingly condescending:
| The fair researcher cannot assume that the Europeans, from the sixteenth century on, were willing to grant the Eastern Christian and Muslim subjects of the sultan the fruits of their cultural renaissance as a mere present. . . . And if this was the case then it cannot be argued that the Ottoman East could have benefitted from the European renaissance without relinquishing its masculine honour and freedom [rujulatihi wa hurriyyatihi, emphasis added]. 53 |
The last reason Ghurbal puts forth is deemed finite and, again, resorts to essentialism and collective mentality:
| The truth about the question of stagnation is that the Ottoman state ruled over degenerated peoples, and the Ottoman rule was incapable of altering this. Because the Ottomans were a qawm that takes and not [one] that gives, and their khittat, belief and culture testify to that. They organized whoever they ruled under their comprehensive possession, and made sure that no change or transformation would reach them. 54 |
Anis's explanation is intriguingly similar, not so much because it is also essentialist and the Dawla 'Uthmaniyya is the same self-contained entity, but because where one would expect to find essentialism of the Marxist variety one encounters in this case too, for the most part, the more common Hegelian variety. Thus, pondering the alleged deterioration under the Ottomans of al-'ulum al-'aqliyya (the rational sciences) in general and "the science of history" in particular, Anis identifies the familiar culprit: "The Ottomans did not possess any cultural capital [rasid hadari] which they could transfer to and invest in Egypt's cultural life." On another occasion Anis offers a fuller explanation. The following passage seems to encapsulate E. H. Carr's definition of history as a dialogue between the present and the past. In the background looms the Nasserite state, grasped as centralized and modernizing, as the diametrical opposite of the Dawla 'Uthmaniyya:
| The Ottoman rule of Egypt--and the other provinces--was based on the principle of leaving things as they had been. . . . For this reason Ottoman Egypt inherited most of the arrangements that had prevailed in the previous period, chiefly in terms of . . . the structure of society itself. Because the Ottoman rule was a weak feudal rule which did not radically altered the life of Egyptian society even though it lasted nearly 300 years. Whether the Ottoman rule was direct or indirect, whether this was an Ottoman intention or international circumstances, this rule caused the political and economic decline of Egypt. To what extent did this occupation leave its imprint on Egypt's intellectual and ideational life? The truth is that the imprint of the Ottoman rule was so insignificant that mentioning it is not worth the bother. 55 |
Turning now to school textbooks, I should point out that my reason for discussing these texts separately is somewhat prosaic: my research on Egyptian school textbooks is preliminary. This separation should not be taken, however, to imply that the particular "genre" of school textbooks ought to be examined in isolation from other components of nationalist historiography, or that they are of secondary importance for the construction of this historiography.
There are, nonetheless, two related features that distinguish the school textbooks from the professional historical works. One is the degree to which the textbooks are so much more condensed. Since these books are clearly intended for the nonspecialist, and since they cover a wide range of subjects and periods, the space allocated to a given subject is limited. The consequence is that in these texts the production of meaning through literary and rhetorical means, even through basic syntax, is that much more ostensive; this adds an interesting dimension to the task of interpreting them.
The other feature is the problem of intentionality. This is an intensely debated problem among interpreters of texts, but it is compounded with regard to the textbooks for two reasons. The first is that each of them is part of a project or a series--al-Tarbiyya al-Wataniyya in this particular case. A basic characteristic of such a project is that in its diachronical evolution each specific item draws heavily on its predecessor(s). It therefore seems to me that in this case intentionality has to be sought in the context of the institutional history of the project (something I have not yet investigated), and that trying to ascribe intentionality to the author(s) of a particular item might not be very fruitful. 56 The second reason is that ascribing self-conscious intentionality to meanings produced through, for instance, syntax is highly speculative. In what follows, therefore, I show that meaning is certainly produced in the school textbooks, but I avoid discussing the intentions of their authors.
Essentially, the three samples of al-Tarbiyya al-Wataniyya examined here perpetuate the nationalist historiographic discourse I have already presented and display adherence to its two chief components: Orientalism and territorial nationness. 57 The basic narrative is a familiar one: the Ottoman "subordination" of Egypt was a sorry--but external and insignificant--stage in the nation's history. The only consequence of the Ottoman conquest to which the textbooks allude, indeed stress and formulate identically, is that "Egypt lost its independence and became a subordinate Ottoman province." The Ottoman rule, however, soon became merely nominal and power was wielded by the Mamluk beys. The dawn of the nineteenth century, epitomized by the French invasion and the ascendancy of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha, ushered in a new era in Egypt's history--the modern era. 58
This narrative is underpinned, first, by the space allotted to the Ottoman period (1517-1798, according to the Orientalist periodization) in comparison to other episodes. The insignificance of that period is fundamentally conveyed by the fact that three centuries of Ottoman rule and three years of French rule are given the same space (two pages) and that the space occupied in these textbooks by the ventures of the great Pasha is larger than both. Equally meaningful are the brief descriptions of the Ottoman period itself. Though these sections ostensibly look as no more than chronological-factual accounts, they severely reduce the importance of the Ottoman period through a representation of time in which the whole period appears shrunken and redundant: the descriptions start with the story of the Ottoman conquest and thence, abruptly and directly, jump to the second half of the eighteenth century where the extent to which Ottoman presence was nominal is illustrated through 'Ali Bey al-Kabir; the conspicuous silence over the period 1520s-1760s signifies its importance, or lack thereof. 59
Another interesting feature in the school textbooks is what might be termed Orientalism-through-syntax. By this I mean the construction of sentences and headings that refer to two sorts of relations: between the Ottomans (or "Turks" in these texts) and Egypt (as a communion of an imagined community and a territory), and between the French and Egypt. What the syntax of these formulations does is to depict the Ottomans as passive vis-á-vis Egypt and the French as active. Among the various cases in which this syntax occurs, the most striking examples are two consecutive subheadings within a large section that presents, in effect, Ghurbal's Misrification of the Eastern Question. These subheadings are even more striking when they appear in the contents, simply because there, one is seen immediately beneath the other. They read as follows (the translation is on purpose as literal as possible): 60
Dukhul Misr taht hukm al-Atrak (The Entrance of Egypt under the Rule of the Turks)."
"Dukhul al-Faransiyyin Misr (The Entrance of the French into Egypt)."
What brings to the fore so powerfully the meaning produced by the syntax is, I think, the proximity: within two lines (in the text) or three centuries (in "history") Misr turns from a subject that "enters" under Ottoman rule into an object into which the French "enter." It is difficult not to recall in this respect Toynbee's phrase cited earlier, whereby "Egypt became a battle-ground on which superhuman Frenchmen and superhuman Englishmen fought one another." 61 A similar sort of syntax abounds in the narrative itself. The syntax conveys the decline-narrative by the following pattern, which is true for all three texts examined here. The "Turks," or Ottomans, are invariably the active subject of the sentences that describe the process of the Ottoman conquest in 1516-1517. As soon as the narrative abruptly turns to the late eighteenth century, however, these "Turks" become the sentences' object, the passive recipients of other agents' acts, be they 'Ali Bey al-Kabir or the French expedition.
The most outstanding illustration for this syntax lies in a single sentence, the function of which in the narrative is to see the reader through the brief period of "interregnum" between the French evacuation and the rise of the Pasha. This sentence appears in nearly identical formulations in all three texts. It, too, displays the power of proximity, for the French are rendered an active subject and the Ottomans a passive object within a single sentence: "When the French had left Egypt, the country returned to Ottoman sovereignty nominally and to Mamluk rule actually." 62 Note also how the syntax changes Egypt's status within the sentence: it is an object before the comma, and the subject (as "the country") thereafter.
The importance attributed to the impact of the French occupation in the textbooks is similar to al-Shayyal's explanation of why "the spontaneous awakening" had to give way to Western culture:
| The French occupation left in Egypt an imprint which the passage of time did not erase, for their entrance was the beginning of the country's awakening from the slumber of the middle ages and the opening of the modern era, and of a novel civilization that unfolded ideas . . . and knowledge with which Egyptians had been unfamiliar until then. The expedition also . . . exposed their [the Mamluks'] weakness and impotence in front of the Egyptians for the first time. 63 |
One of these textbooks goes farther than al-Shayyal and manifests not only appreciation of French culture but also familial affection. This affection is expressed after the text has "conceded" that in the rivalry between Britain and France over the "Egyptian Question" the former gained the upper hand. The following statement is a tangible reminder of the fact that until today the French of many upper-class Egyptians is as fluent as their Arabic: "However . . . the bond that tied France to Egypt became one which resembles the bond that ties the master to his pupil [al-ustadh bi-tilmidhihi]." 64
In 1996, as part of an undergraduate seminar titled "Cairo: A History of a City," my department organized a trip to Cairo. Our group comprised thirty-five students and six faculty members; we enjoyed the overwhelming beauty and historical and cultural variety of Cairo for two weeks. One of the most striking features of that tour, conveyed by the tour's "plot," the tour-guides, the students' Arabic teachers, and the Egyptian intellectuals we met (among them Lutfi al-Khuli, 'Ali Salim, and Ahmad Khamrush), was the extent to which, from the vantage point of 1996, the Egyptian territorial-organic narrative has prevailed and triumphed, including its Orientalist facet. For many of the students this particular feature also served as a critical mirror of their own nationalism/historiography.
Though not wishing anachronistically to argue that the eventual prevalence of this narrative is a fair reflection of the options that may have existed along the way, I do think that nationalist narratives, once formed, leave little room for pluralist contestation. This is particularly the case when such a narrative becomes that of a strong, centralized nation-state. The unanimous nature of the Egyptian historical discourse with regard to the Ottoman past, despite the changing historical circumstances that have surrounded this discourse, illustrates the endurance and tenacity of nationalist, territorial historical consciousness.
While researching and writing this article I was a fellow in the Middle East Seminar, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. I benefited greatly from the seminar's discussions. I am particularly indebted to the wisdom, scholarship and friendship of Azmi Bishara, Rivka Feldhai, Adel Mana, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Ursula Wokoeck.
Notes
Note 1: In general, my understanding of Orientalism as a discourse and the practices derived from it follow Edward Said's Orientalism (New York, 1978). For a neatly crafted exposition of academic Orientalism see Fred Halliday, " 'Orientalism' and its Critics," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20:2 (1993): 145-163. Back.
Note 2: For a parallel analysis of the morphology and function of Orientalism in Zionist/Israeli historiography, see my "Domestic Orientalism: The Representation of 'Oriental' Jews in Zionist/Israeli Historiography," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23:2 (December 1996). Back.
Note 3: Hayden White, Metahistory; idem, "History, Historicism, and the Figurative Imagination," History and Theory 14 (1975), 48-67; idem, "The Fictions of Factual Representation," in Angus Fletcher (ed.), The Literature of Fact (New York, 1976), 21-44; idem, "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," in his Content of the Form, 27-57; idem, "Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," ibid., 1-26. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 4: Though I lay emphasis on the analogy between the approaches of White and Anderson, an important difference should also be noted. Anderson's understanding of historical reality, in a subtle and sophisticated way, is basically material and empirical. Although he undermines the dichotomy between "invented" and "real" communities, his explanation is ultimately material: technological changes bring about changes in the conception of time and space; only within the latter is modern consciousness conceivable. Hayden White's approach consists of a combination between Russian Formalism and French Poststructuralism. From his perspective, past reality as it occurred is chaotic and meaningless. What shapes and endows it with meaning is the consciousness of the present, which unfolds through language and, in the particular case of modern historiography, through a variety of narrative emplotments. Back.
Note 5: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1989). Back.
Note 6: Timothy Mitchell, "The Limit of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics," American Political Science Review 85:1 (1991): 77-96. Back.
Note 7: White, "Fictions," 22-29. Back.
Note 8: White, "Question," 27. Back.
Note 10: This is a recurring and fundamental argument in White's work as a whole. Most indicative is the title White gave to his 1987 collection of essays, The Content of the Form. Back.
Note 11: White, "Question," 42-43. Back.
Note 12: White, "Fictions," 23-26. Back.
Note 13: I am aware of Partha Chatterjee's critique of Anderson. Chatterjee himself, however, notices the transformative potential of the concept of imagined community, and he criticizes other facets in Anderson's work. See his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 19-22, and The Nation and Its Fragments, 13-14. Back.
Note 14: Alon Confino, "The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory, and the German Empire, 1871-1918," History and Memory 5:1 (Spring/Summer 1993): 42-86. Back.
Note 15: These are "Census, Map, Museum" and "Memory and Forgetting" (chapters 10 and 11 respectively). Back.
Note 16: Smith, Ethnic Origins, 7-13. Back.
Note 18: Anderson, Imagined Communities, xii. Back.
Note 19: Ibid., 6 and 6n. Back.
Note 20: Ibid., 4-5, and chapter 2 ("Cultural Roots"). Back.
Note 21: Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as Cultural System," in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). For a stimulating evaluation of Geertz's theory and its relevance to historians see Dominick LaCapra, "Culture and Ideology," Poetics Today 9:2 (1988): 377-394. Back.
Note 22: Among the works I have hitherto seen there are two serious and fruitful attempts to apply Anderson's approach: one, cited above, is Alon Confino's study of the German Heimat; the other, fascinating because it takes Anderson beyond the realm of the nation, is Zachary Lockman's examination of the Egyptian working class ("Imagining the Working Class: Representations of Society and Class in Egypt Before 1914," Poetics Today 15 [1994]). Back.
Note 23: An important qualification should be registered. Owing to the way in which my study has hitherto evolved, I have not yet dealt properly with the work of 'Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi'i, which doubtless played a major role in shaping the territorial Egyptian narrative. Rafi'i's work will be thoroughly examined in the next stage of my study. Back.
Note 24: Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt; idem, Egyptian Nation; a concise exposition of their thesis is formulated in Gershoni, "Evolution." Back.
Note 25: Ursula Wokoeck, "State, Islam, and Nation in Egypt," Wiener Seminar on "Rethinking Nationalism," Tel Aviv University, 1993 (unpublished). I thank the author for permitting me to cite her paper. Back.
Note 26: Gershoni, "Evolution." Back.
Note 27: Sami Zubaida, "The Nation-State in the Middle East" in idem, Islam: The People and the State (London, 1989), 121-182; Owen, State, Power, and Politics. Back.
Note 28: Edward Said, "Identity, Negation, and Violence," in idem, The Politics of Dispossession (London, 1992), 353. As acknowledged by him, Said stimulatingly borrows this term from Martin Jay's interpretation of Adorno. Back.
Note 29: Shafik Ghorbal [Shafiq Ghurbal], The Beginning of the Egyptian Question and the Rise of Mehmet Ali (London, 1928), xiii-xiv and 1-2. I am not unaware of Youssef Choueiri's thorough examination of Ghurbal's historiography in his book Arab History and the Nation-State (London, 1989), 65-104. As the space and topic of this particular essay are ill-suited for a lengthy discussion of a single rationalist historian, I do not deal here with Choueiri's interesting interpretation. Back.
Note 31: The use of rukud in this particular context appears frequently in the introductions to the two following books by al-Shayyal: Ta'rikh al-Tarjama fi Misr fi 'Ahd al-Hamla al-Faransiyya (Cairo, 1950); al-Ta'rikh wa al-Mu'arrikhun fi Misr fi al-Qarn al-Tasi' 'Ashr (Alexandria, 1958). Back.
Note 32: Al-Shayyal, Tarjama, 3-6, and Ta'rikh, 7-10. The thesis recurs in his later publications in English. Back.
Note 33: Al-Shayyal, Tarjama, 196-197. Back.
Note 34: In al-Shayyal's Ta'rikh, Lam (Arabic). Back.
Note 35: See for instance the following classifications: Shimon Shamir, "Self-View in Modern Egyptian Historiography," in idem (ed.), Self-Views in Historical Perspective in Egypt and Israel (Tel Aviv, 1981), 47-49; Rifaat Ali Abou El-Haj, "Social Uses of the Past: Recent Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule," International Journal of Middle East Studies 14 (1982): 187-195. Back.
Note 36: Muhammad Anis, Madrasat al-Ta'rikh al-Misri fi al-'Asr al-'Uthmani (Cairo, 1962). Back.
Note 37: Muhammad Anis, al-Dawla al-'Uthmaniyya wa al-Sharq al-'Arabi (Cairo, n.d.), 140. Back.
Note 38: Al-Shayyal, Tarjama, 11. Back.
Note 39: Anis, Madrasa, 14 and, in another formulation, Dawla, 141. Back.
Note 40: Abdul Rahman Abdul Rahim, "The Ottoman Rule and its Effects on Egyptian Society," Journal of Asian and African Studies [Japan], 13 (1977): 57-76. Back.
Note 42: For a concise exposition of this discourse see again Gershoni, "Evolution," 326-329. Back.
Note 43: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9-36. Back.
Note 44: The passage that discusses this classification is based on Shamir, "Self-View," 37-51. Back.
Note 46: Al-Shayyal, Tarjama, 8. Back.
Note 47: Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?"; trans. and ann. Martin Thom, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 19. Back.
Note 48: Anis, Madrasa, 27. Back.
Note 49: For example Abdul Rahim, "Ottoman Rule," 74. Back.
Note 51: Al-Shayyal, Tarjama, 10-12. Back.
Note 56: It would not be unexpected to discover that Rafi'i's work had a formative influence on the narrative constructed in these textbooks. Back.
Note 57: Al-Tarbiyya al-Wataniyya, published in Cairo by: Tawfiq al-Mar'ashli, 1928; 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Bishri, 1929; Muhammad Rif'at and 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Bishri, 1943. Back.
Note 58: Al-Bishri, 175-176; al-Mar'ashli, 134-135; Rif'at and al-Bishri, 130-131 and 172-173. Back.
Note 59: For the accounts on the Ottoman period see ibid. Cf. the French invasion and Muhammad 'Ali's rule in al-Bishri, 175-176 and 176-183; al-Mar'ashli, 135-136 and 136-139; Rif'at and al-Bishri, 132-133 and 173-174 (the French), 134-139 and 174-175 (Muhammad 'Ali). Back.
Note 60: Rif'at and al-Bishri, contents and 172-173. Back.
Note 61: . In the foreword to Ghorbal, Beginning. Back.
Note 62: Rif'at and al-Bishri, 174 and, in a slightly different formulation, 134; see also al-Bishri, 176 and al-Mar'ashli, 136. Back.
Note 63: Rif'at and al-Bishri, 132. Back.
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