Desert Borderland

The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya

Matthew H. Ellis

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503605572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Desert Borderland investigates the historical processes that transformed political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert in the half century before World War I. Adopting a view from the margins—illuminating the little-known history of the Egyptian–Libyan borderland—the book challenges prevailing notions of how Egypt and Libya were constituted as modern territorial nation-states.

Matthew H. Ellis draws on a wide array of archival sources to reconstruct the multiple layers and meanings of territoriality in this desert borderland. Throughout the decades, a heightened awareness of the existence of distinctive Egyptian and Ottoman Libyan territorial spheres began to develop despite any clear-cut boundary markers or cartographic evidence. National territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt's western—or Ottoman Libya's eastern—domains by centralizing state power. Rather, it developed only through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with local groups motivated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging. By the early twentieth century, distinctive "Egyptian" and "Libyan" territorial domains emerged—what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya.

1

Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands

Writing in 1931, retired Egyptian Coast Guard officer Andre von Dumreicher explained that “the Administration of the Nile Valley has been for years as well organized as that of any European country, but the deserts of Egypt had not been subjected to any interference by the Government until thirty-five years ago, when the Coast Guard Camel Corps was ordered to penetrate into the remotest parts of these wastes.”¹ Although Dumreicher is right that Egypt’s Coast Guard Administration (Maslahat Khafr al-Sawahil), with its celebrated Camel Corps, began to serve an important policing function in Egypt’s deserts after around 1896,² it remains difficult to discern how these areas were governed before then. This is partly due to an acute lack of archival documentation, but it also reflects the fragmented nature of Egyptian administration beyond the Nile Valley. Before World War I, there was no single department responsible for governing the Egyptian West; rather, administration of the region was split among several discrete units, all based in the Nile Valley.

That it was necessary to carve up such a sparsely inhabited region among different governmental branches was undoubtedly a function of its vastness: today, Egyptian territory west of the Nile spans some 263,000 square miles, or more than two-thirds of the country’s total land area. Given how large the Nile looms in popular perceptions of Egypt, it is easy to forget that the bulk of Egyptian soil actually comprises desert terrain. As archaeologist Ahmed Fakhry has pointed out, “the Nile Valley is, in fact, nothing but an oasis” in the extensive desert belt that runs east from Morocco’s Atlantic coast through Sinai and Arabia, continuing all the way to Central Asia.³

The Egyptian West’s disjointed administration was also a function of the area’s strikingly diverse physical and human geography. From the government’s perspective, each of the region’s landscapes posed distinct challenges.

First, there was the Mediterranean coastal plateau (al-diffa). This is a narrow strip of relatively fertile land—approximately twenty-five miles from north to south—that rises gradually from the outskirts of Alexandria all the way west to the cliffs of Sollum (located just a few miles from the Libyan border). The region has historically been inhabited by various bedouin tribes, most notably the Awlad ‘Ali, who made good use of the scrubland on the southern edge of the plateau for grazing their livestock. Among the many small settlements dotting the shoreline, only Marsa Matruh—built around a picturesque harbor, approximately two hundred miles west of Alexandria—was close to being a major town, growing in the decade before World War I to become what one contemporary observer called the “commercial centre of the desert.”⁴

Beyond the dramatic 640-foot escarpment marking the southern edge of the coastal plateau lies western Egypt’s vast desert interior, though the broad term “desert” here, too, conceals an assortment of landscapes—ranging from the sweeping expanse of dunes known as the “Great Sand Sea” (in the far west, beginning just south of Siwa) to the dramatic mountains and rock formations of the “black” and “white” deserts outside Bahariya. This is to say nothing of the stark variations in altitude that the desert presents as one moves progressively south from the coastal plateau. The Egyptian Western Desert is striated by a series of ancient depressions that sit at or near sea level, affording access to subterranean water sources. Each of the five main western oases—Siwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Kharga, and Dakhla—lies inside one of seven major depressions, where natural springs and accessible ground water have enabled small sedentary communities to flourish.

Although these western oases are nowadays typically viewed as a single unit (not least in tourist guidebooks),⁵ before World War I they fell into different administrative orbits, depending on their relative distance from the Nile Valley. Dakhla and Kharga—much closer to the Nile than Bahariya, Farafra, and especially Siwa—were more firmly tied to the social and political life of Upper Egypt (the stretch of the Nile Valley south of Cairo).⁶ But we should not presume that proximity to the Nile was historically the paramount determinant of territorial identity for the western oases—even Dakhla and Kharga. Indeed, the very names of these two oases imply that their primary orientation was not toward the Nile, but rather the desert interior: Dakhla (“inside” or “inner”) is in fact further west than Kharga (“outside” or “outer”); from the perspective of one approaching the two oases from deeper inside the Sahara, the one that is closer to the Nile is the “outer” one.

MAP 3. The “Egyptian West” and northeastern Libya.

Claude Jarvis, a British officer who served in a variety of desert posts during his career, alluded to the Egyptian state’s fragmentary approach to governing the West: “The Coastguards had policed the Western Desert and Red Sea District; and the [Ministry of the] Interior had functioned in the oases of Kharga, Dakhla, Bahariya, and Farafra; whilst the Ministries of Justice, Finance, Health, Education, etc., had all supplied officials to perform their various duties.”⁷ But the administration was even more disjointed than Jarvis describes. Muhammad Ramzi, who compiled an authoritative geographical dictionary of Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, established that the Interior Ministry administered the various oases through several different Egyptian governorates (mudiriyyat). Dakhla and Kharga were governed through the Asyut governorate,⁸ but Bahariya and Farafra were attached to the governorate of Minya. And Siwa, which Jarvis neglected to mention—as well as Marsa Matruh and other coastal outposts, such as Sidi Barrani—would eventually be annexed to Buhayra.⁹

This patchwork system for governing the Egyptian West lasted until the First World War, when military developments along both Egypt’s eastern and western frontiers compelled authorities to take immediate action. Under pressure from the Ottomans in Sinai and the Sanusiyya in the Western Desert, and citing wartime exigency, the British military in Egypt made the unilateral decision to unify Egypt’s desert administration. In late 1916, British High Commissioner Reginald Wingate announced the formation of the Frontier Districts Administration (FDA), which subsumed all the administrative and police units that had formerly operated in the Western Desert and oases, including the Egyptian Coast Guard. The FDA would go on to play a crucial role in controlling Egypt’s oasis and desert populations long after the conflict ended: its organization into three geographical units—the Eastern Desert, Western Desert, and Sinai divisions—formed the basis for the system of government that operates in Egypt’s desert regions to this day.¹⁰

Jarvis became a leading figure in the FDA in the years following the war, and later praised the department’s work in several publications reflecting upon his long career in Egypt. In these reflections, Jarvis echoed Dumreicher’s assertion that the Egyptian government’s efforts to manage its desert and oasis territories before the creation of the FDA had failed miserably: “The Egyptian Army looked upon service in the desert as penal servitude; the Coastguards, being hard-boiled anti-contrabandists, saw the Arabs only as potential smugglers, whilst the Interior and other Ministries used the deserts as punishment stations . . . in those days, they [the Egyptians] cared nothing about anything that happened five miles away from the River Nile.”¹¹

This sketch of the Egyptian state’s uneven administrative geography before World War I is at odds with enduring nationalist assumptions about Egypt’s historical fixity as a bounded political community. More than this, however, it raises fundamental questions about how and why these remote desert and oasis territories beyond the Nile Valley began to matter to the Egyptian state in the first place. This chapter opens the book’s investigation of territoriality in Egypt by examining how the steady expansion and centralization of the Egyptian state’s governing practices and institutions in the few decades before World War I unfolded in the country’s borderlands.

This analysis has implications for our understanding of Egyptian sovereignty in this period. Historian Lauren Benton has argued that “both law and geography produced ways of structuring understandings of empires as configurations of corridors and enclaves, objects of a disaggregated and uneven sovereignty.”¹² In late-nineteenth-century Egypt, too, the mechanisms of state centralization yielded a “disaggregated and uneven sovereignty,” whereby Egypt’s borderlands emerged as enclaves of legal exceptionalism within the nascent modern nation-state. Moreover, the difficulties that the Egyptian government encountered in attempting to standardize its judicial institutions in the borderlands, with their primarily bedouin and oasis-dwelling populations, produced a discourse of otherness that would become de rigueur in local negotiations over sovereignty in this period. By highlighting the dynamic, interactive process through which Egyptian state sovereignty was introduced into the country’s marginal domains, this chapter argues that the territorial imperatives of the centralizing Egyptian state ultimately worked in tandem with—and continued to rely upon—local, decentralized institutions and legal frameworks.

Siwa makes a particularly apt case study for examining Egyptian sovereignty as a process of negotiation between a tentative state and powerful local actors. Although the understanding of sovereignty that can be gained from this example would obtain for all of Egypt’s marginal territories in the same period, Siwa stands out given its unique position within Egyptian nationalist historiography as well as in popular lore.

The place of Siwa in the nationalist imagination follows from its near mythical representation as Egypt’s far-flung final frontier. Siwa stands out from the other western oases for having been settled by a distinctive ethno-linguistic group: Siwans are of Berber, not Arab, descent and historically spoke Siwi (a dialect of Tamazight), not Arabic; it is an open question whether most Siwans knew much if any Arabic before the 1920s.¹³ Partly due to their status as a population apart, Siwans earned the reputation of being the fiercest defenders of their autonomy among Egypt’s oasis-dwelling communities, and historically the most dangerous and ungovernable. Accordingly, Egyptian historians of the oasis have tended to consider Cairo’s so-called “conquest” of Siwa at the end of the nineteenth century as a key turning point. For example, former army officer Rif ʻat Gawhari opens his detailed history of Siwa by meditating on the unique notoriety of the oasis, which had inspired “fear and mystery” throughout the ages.¹⁴ Yet he then explains how Siwa ultimately fell under “the absolute rule of Egypt,” as a result of several military campaigns dating back to Mehmed ‘Ali’s rule.¹⁵

It is this same mythology that serves as the point of departure for Baha’a Taher’s celebrated historical novel, Sunset Oasis (Wahat al-ghurub), which tells the story of a fictional Egyptian officer, Mahmud ‘Abd al-Zahir, who has been assigned by the Interior Ministry to become the new ma’mur (district governor) of Siwa in the late-1890s.¹⁶ The central role of Siwan lore in the narrative is voiced most directly through ‘Abd al-Zahir’s English wife, Catherine, who accompanies her husband on his tour of duty despite the purported dangers. As she puts it, while on the long caravan journey to the oasis: “Everything about it is like a myth—the place, the people, the history, the geography . . . Its inhabitants belong to the west, not the east, to the Zenata tribe of Berbers in Morocco, and they speak a Berber dialect. Despite this, in ancient times they were part of the Egypt of the pharaohs and a centre for the worship of their great god, Amun.”¹⁷ Elsewhere, Taher invokes the conventional account of Siwan autonomy and resistance to government interference by having Catherine recount the oasis’s turbulent nineteenth-century history: “I have read how they resisted Egyptian rule, ceaselessly rebelling and rising up against the soldiers and fighting them, while the Egyptians ceaselessly repressed their uprisings with a savagery that gave birth to new rebellions and new uprisings. And I know, as does Mahmoud, that the district commissioner, who is the ruler of the oasis, will always be a prize trophy for them.”¹⁸ Taher subscribes to the standard narrative of the Egyptian nation-state’s successful incorporation of Siwa in this period, writing in the novel’s postscript that “the customs of the nineteenth century have now disappeared and Siwa has become an authentically Egyptian re...