This book deals with the transition of Egypt from Mamluk to Ottoman rule, a subject that has not been investigated before; Waqf documents are a major source for this study which also treats urban and architectural development as an aspect of the history of the period.
First study to cover the whole of this period and focus on both social change and cultural/religious life The period is crucial to understanding modern Egyptian consciousness Author uses primary sources, not available anywhere else
Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule deals with the impact of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt on its political, religious and social institutions, their transition from the Mamluk to the Ottoman regime and further development up to the 17th century. The relationship between the Ottoman ruling establishment, the local religious groups and the military aristocracy is discussed in the first part of the volume. Waqf documents are a major source for this study which, in the second part, analyzes and compares the endowments of the Ottoman governors and those of the military aristocracy and their respective impact on the urban development and architecture of Cairo in this period. The architecture is documented with 70 photographs and figures. By integrating architecture and urbanism in the historical analysis of the period under study, this book is important for historians and art historians of Egypt.
This book analyses the development of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining the cultural, socio-economic and political backdrop against which Sufism gained prominence, it looks at its influence in both the institutions for religious learning and popular piety. The study seeks to broaden the observed space of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt by placing it within its imperial and international context, highlighting on one hand the specificities of Egyptian Sufism, and on the other the links that it maintained with other spiritual traditions that influenced it. Studying Sufism as a global phenomenon, taking into account its religious, cultural, social and political dimensions, this book also focuses on the education of the increasing number of aspirants on the Sufi path, as well as on the social and political role of the Sufi masters in a period of constant and often violent political upheaval. It ultimately argues that, starting in medieval times, Egypt was simultaneously attracting foreign scholars inward and transmitting ideas outward, but these exchanges intensified during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the new imperial context in which the country and its people found themselves. Hence, this book demonstrates that the concept of ‘neosufism’ should be dispensed with and that the Ottoman period in no way constituted a time of decline for religious culture, or the beginning of a normative and fundamentalist Islam. Sufism in Ottoman Egypt provides a valuable contribution to the new historiographical approach to the period, challenging the prevailing teleology. As such, it will prove useful to students and scholars of Islam, Sufism and religious history, as well as Middle Eastern history more generally.
Law and identification transgressed political boundaries in the nineteenth-century Levant. Over the course of the century, Italo-Levantines- elite and common- exercised a strategy of resilient hybridity whereby an unintentional form of legal imperialism took root in Egypt. This book contributes to a vibrant strand of global legal history that places law and other social structures at the heart of competing imperial projects- British, Ottoman, Egyptian, and Italian among them. Analysis of the Italian consular and mixed court cases, and diplomatic records, in Egypt and Istanbul reveals the complexity of shifting identifications and judicial reform in two parts of the interactive and competitive plural legal regime. The rich court records show that binary relational categories fail to capture the complexity of the daily lives of the residents and courts of the late Ottoman empire. Over time and acting in their own self-interests, these actors exploited the plural legal regime. Case studies in both Egypt and Istanbul explore how identification developed as a legal form of property itself. Whereas the classical literature emphasized external state power politics, this book builds upon new work in the field that shows the interaction of external and internal power struggles throughout the region led to assorted forms of confrontation, collaboration, and negotiation in the region. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and readers of Middle East, Ottoman, and Mediterranean history. It will also appeal to anyone wanting to know more about cultural history in the nineteenth century, and the historical roots of contemporary global debates on law, migration, and identities.
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. --
In one of the first ever environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire, Alan Mikhail examines relations between the empire and its most lucrative province of Egypt. Based on both the local records of various towns and villages in rural Egypt and the imperial orders of the Ottoman state, this book charts how changes in the control of natural resources fundamentally altered the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty in Egypt and throughout the empire. In revealing how Egyptian peasants were able to use their knowledge and experience of local environments to force the hand of the imperial state, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt tells a story of the connections of empire stretching from canals in the Egyptian countryside to the palace in Istanbul, from the forests of Anatolia to the shores of the Red Sea, and from a plague flea's bite to the fortunes of one of the most powerful states of the early modern world.
The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.
In Power Brokers in Ottoman Egypt, Side Emre documents the biography of Ibrahim-i Gulshani and the history of the Khalwati-Gulshani order of dervishes (c. 1440-1600). Set mainly in Mamluk-Egypt, and in the century following the region’s conquest by the Ottomans, this book analyzes sociopolitical dialogues at the geographic peripheries of an empire through the actions of and official responses to the Gulshaniyya network. Emre argues that the members of this Sufi order exerted social and political leverage and contributed significantly to the political culture of the empire and Egypt. The Gulshanis are uncovered as unexpected figures among the roster of influential players, in contrast with empire-centered historiographies that depict Ottoman ruling and learned elites as the primary shapers and narrators of the fates of conquered provinces and peoples. The Gulshanis’ political and cultural legacy is situated within an analysis of perceptions of Sufism in the early modern Ottoman world.
Animals in rural Egypt became enmeshed in social relationships and made possible many tasks otherwise impossible. Rather than focus on what animals represented or symbolized, Mikhail discusses their social and economic functions, as Ottoman Egypt cannot be understood without acknowledging animals as central shapers of the early modern world.