The Great Social Laboratory

Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt

Omnia El Shakry

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780804781923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

The Great Social Laboratory charts the development of the human sciences—anthropology, human geography, and demography—in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. Tracing both intellectual and institutional genealogies of knowledge production, this book examines social science through a broad range of texts and cultural artifacts, ranging from the ethnographic museum to architectural designs to that pinnacle of social scientific research—"the article."Omnia El Shakry explores the interface between European and Egyptian social scientific discourses and interrogates the boundaries of knowledge production in a colonial and post-colonial setting. She examines the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in the Egyptian colonial context, uncovering the new modes of governance, expertise, and social knowledge that defined a distinctive era of nationalist politics in the inter- and post-war periods. Finally, she examines the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians.

I The Anthropology of the Modern Egyptians:
From the Fin-de-Siècle to the Second World War

1 The Ethnographic Moment

In an 1869 letter to Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79), renowned for his desire to recreate Cairo as a “Paris of the East,” archaeologist, savant, and medical doctor Gaillardot Bey put forward a proposition: the creation of a scientific institution for geographical explorations, along with an attendant framework of museums, libraries, and educational programs.¹ The importance of this project, stressed Gaillardot, was in its reformist and civilizing spirit, a continuation of the reforms initiated by the modernizing Ottoman viceroy Mehmed ‘Ali himself. Gaillardot pointed out that the establishment of such an institution would be the first of its kind in the Orient (and would rectify the relative absence of scholarly societies in Egypt), thereby placing Isma‘il at the head of scientific innovations as well as moral and intellectual progress. Nor did he hesitate to remind Isma‘il of the excitement created by his personal appearance at and Egypt’s participation in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which inspired the admiration not only of savants, but of the “ignorant” public as well. Attached to Gaillardot’s letter was a report detailing the process of establishing the proposed scientific institution and emphasizing the need to conduct studies that would expound the country’s natural resources, in view of profit, as well as its moral order, in the view of progress.²

A mere six years later, in 1875, the Royal Geographic Society of Egypt was founded, part of a larger cultural revival sponsored by the Egyptian court. As Gaillardot Bey’s letter intimated, Khedive Isma‘il was actively involved in the representation of Egypt to the Western world, or what Timothy Mitchell has referred to as the “exhibitionary order” of nineteenth-century Europe.³ It was not only Europeans, therefore, who desired to represent Egypt on a Western stage to a Western audience. For example, Egypt’s pavilions at the 1867 Exposition Universelle were designed by French Egyptologist August Mariette; Isma‘il’s extravagant celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in November of 1869 replicated key elements of the world’s fairs; and Isma‘il himself commissioned Verdi’s masterpiece Orientalist opera, Aïda.⁴ This complicity of colonial forms of knowledge production (world’s fairs and Orientalist art) and Egyptian state institutions complicates our understanding of the production of knowledge in colonial contexts. Individuals who were involved in state-sponsored knowledge production—for example, those working in the Royal Geographic Society of Egypt—participated in a wider shared culture of scientific expeditions (often with their own imperial aspirations in sub-Saharan Africa), museums, and ethnographies, all of which contributed to the formulation of a colonial modernity in late nineteenth century Egypt. As Mauricio Tenorio Trillo has observed with respect to Mexico, “Mexico joined the world’s fair circuit in order to learn, imitate, and publicize its own possession of the universal truths of progress, science, and industry.”⁵ Yet, these universal truths were invariably inflected with the specificity of locale, “Mexican sciences, Mexican art, Mexican nationhood.”⁶ Or as Zeynep Çelik has noted in comparing the Egyptian khedive Isma‘il with the Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz, who also attended the 1867 Paris Exposition amid much fanfare, “[w]orld’s fairs were idealized platforms where cultures could be encapsulated visually—through artifacts and arts but also, more prominently, through architecture.”⁷

The Royal Geographic Society in Egypt (which exemplified the porous boundaries between anthropology and geography) provides an excellent case study of this culture shared by Europeans and non-Europeans who engaged anthropological and geographical ideas, practices, and debates surrounding the modern Egyptians. The foundation of the society was a crucial moment in the authorization, and transformation, of European social-scientific knowledge in Egypt. Scholars have begun to explore the ways in which authoritative disciplinized knowledge, such as nineteenth-century European geography, was formed through the “effacement of alternative subject-positions and the appropriation of other ways of knowing,” for example the knowledge of central Africans.⁸ By paying attention to “the historical processes that condemned certain knowledges, meanings and subjects to a place outside the field of what was considered, intelligible, rational, and disciplined scientific discourse,” these studies contribute much to our understanding of the constitution of scientific knowledge in its colonial manifestation.⁹ Nevertheless, although indigenous actors (in their role as “informants”) appear in these accounts as coauthors of geographical knowledge, these studies do not directly address the scientific production of local geographical or anthropological knowledge by indigenous authors themselves. Curiously, very few histories of non-European attempts to produce and disseminate geographical and anthropological knowledge exist.¹⁰

We can address this gap by foregrounding the site of knowledge production in Egypt, and its co-production by Europeans and non-Europeans. This is not to be understood in the postmodern sense of a critique of ethnographic authority—such critiques emerge from within the disciplinary boundaries and epistemological commitments of anthropology itself.¹¹ Thus, rather than emphasizing the importance of these anthropological ideas for European anthropology (the formation of British social anthropology) or European classicism (the question of the origins of the Ancient Egyptians), or even the history of colonialism (how debates on the ethnic and racial classification of the modern Egyptians fed into the larger political and social context of the “long” nineteenth-century European colonization of Egypt), I instead view anthropological ideas and practices as crucial to the development of a social-scientific mode of thought in Egypt.¹² In this mode of thought, Egyptians were to become authors as well as subjects of knowledge. In contrasting the development of a colonial and an incipient local, or Egyptian, mode of knowledge production in the anthropology of the modern Egyptians, I argue that although a shared culture of anthropology and geography existed, subtle differences began to emerge, particularly in the heated anticolonial climate of the interwar period as political conditions transformed intellectual production.

Institutional Foundations:
The Royal Geographic Society of Egypt

The Royal Geographic Society of Egypt (RGS) was founded on May 19, 1875, under the auspices of Khedive Isma‘il.¹³ Its aim was to place Egypt—already at the crossroads of voyages of exploration—at the center of geographical travel to and from Africa, and to encourage the development of geography as a science, thereby stimulating industrial and commercial interests in the country.¹⁴ Cairo, “la plus grande porte de l’Afrique,” was ideally situated as the meeting place for explorers to banish “blank spots” from the map of Africa.¹⁵ European explorers, travelers, and scholars would often pass through Cairo; among the more prestigious who spoke at the society were Georg August Schweinfurth,¹⁶ Henry Morton Stanley,¹⁷ Richard Francis Burton,¹⁸ Ferdinand de Lesseps,¹⁹ August Mariette Pasha,²⁰ and Francis Galton.²¹

Khedive Isma‘il’s imperial ambitions in the interior of Africa and the Sudan (especially from 1863 to 1885), although ultimately unsuccessful, provided much of the impetus for the African focus of the RGS’s early years.²² Perhaps nothing speaks more poignantly of Egypt’s African colonial ambitions than a memorandum written by the quartermaster-general of the Egyptian army in November of 1876. Noting the September 1876 Geographical Congress held at the Royal Palace in Brussels, under the tutelage of King Leopold II, and the intensification of European interest in the fertile lands of central Africa, the quartermaster-general encouraged the Khedive to emphasize not only the exploration, but also the exploitation of equatorial Africa.²³

The society was founded at a time when Khedive Isma‘il was building upon the institutional innovations of Ottoman viceroy Mehmed ‘Ali (the proverbial “founder of modern Egypt”), and establishing many of Egypt’s major cultural and literary institutions, such as the National Library, Dar al-‘Ulum Teachers College, and the national opera; Egypt’s journalistic culture was also blossoming.²⁴ As an institution, the RGS endeavored to explore all the various branches of geography (physical, human, economic, historical, biological), as well as to encourage the development of geographical and ethnographic studies in Egypt.²⁵ Among its members were literati, amateur scholars of geography, geology, archaeology, anthropology, antiquity, museum curators, and “gentleman” explorers.²⁶ Far from being concerned solely with the exploration of Africa, the Society had as its goal nothing short of contributing to Egypt’s modernization, through the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge. The khedive not only donated the building premises, a palace located on Qasr al-‘Ayni Street, as well as 2,500 volumes to begin the library’s collection, but he also underwrote an annual government subsidy to the society.²⁷

Although the RGS had a brief hiatus shortly after its inception in which meetings and publications ceased (during Egypt’s severe financial and economic crises in the late 1870s), the society quickly regained its momentum by regularizing its finances, and by 1881 it was able to send Egyptian delegates to the Third International Geographical Congress and Exhibition at Venice—the only African country represented at the congress.²⁸ In fact, by 1890 the president of the RGS, Abbate Pasha, could assert that the society had taken an active part in the reconnaissance of the geographical world, established congenial relations with savants and explorers, and demonstrated Egypt’s continued contribution to geography.²⁹

As Egypt’s independence was bending under the weight of British financial and military hegemony, its former focus during the reign of Khedive Isma‘il, that of grand discoveries, was quickly shifting. Khedive Isma‘il’s attempts to extend his dominion into the hinterlands of southern Sudan, Equatoria, and Abyssinia between 1869–79 ended in unqualified failure. By the time of the outbreak of the Mahdist revolt in 1881 Egyptian administration in its African principalities was severely weakened. For instance, the Egyptian administration of Dar Fur, which had been formally annexed in 1874, collapsed in 1883. By that time, Khedive Isma‘il had been deposed (in 1879) and his son, Tawfiq Pasha, (r. 1879–92) instated. With the 1882 invasion of Egypt by the British, Egypt’s rule in the Sudan was wholly circumscribed by British policy.³⁰ By the time of General Charles Gordon’s beheading in 1885, Egypt’s involvement in Sudan was attenuated, although Egyptian teachers, soldiers, and administrators continued a strong involvement in Sudan well into the twentieth century.³¹

As Egypt’s African colonial ambitions waned, the Royal Geographic Society reoriented itself geographically closer to home—toward Egypt and Sudan—and thematically toward ethnography and folklore, beginning an ethnographic collection for Sudan by 1898.³² A critical moment in this process was the establishment of a small ethnographic museum, which was basically a more permanent version of Egypt’s pavilion at the Venice Exposition of 1881. In December of 1898, Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (r. 1892–1914) inaugurated the geographical and ethnographic museum (Le Musée de Géographie et d’Ethnographie) of the Royal Geographic Society.³³ Although the RGS initially encountered difficulties in obtaining funding to secure objects, Frédéric Bonola Bey (with the aid of Onofrio Abbate Pasha) persisted in soliciting voyagers and friends of the society to donate some of the objects collected on their journeys; his efforts were successful, and it was primarily his vision that made possible the realization of the ethnographic museum.³⁴ In 1891 Bonola Bey secured a promissory loan from the government to build a museum building adjacent to the society itself, but it was not until January 1898 that construction was completed.³⁵

Bonola Bey and Abbate Pasha, both Italians, were prominent figures in the Royal Geographic Society from 1885 until World War I, so much so that Donald Reid categorizes their tenur...