[MUSIC] Welcome back. This week we'd liked to talk about Egypt and North Africa. And as you are probably aware, it's a region that has played a particularly prominent role in the recent upheavals of the so-called Arab Spring, particularly Egypt and Tunisia. And we will talk a little bit about the origins of the current unrest. But we will focus on the background of the social and political arrangements in the region that has led to the current upheavals rather than talking about the upheavals as such. Let's begin with Egypt. Egypt has played always a very prominent role in Arab and Muslim affairs, and that's primarily a function of its size, but also a function of its peculiar role within the Ottoman Empire. If you remember from last week's videos, you saw that the Ottoman Empire was a very large, widespread, very heterogeneous arrangement. If you look at the map you see that the area under nominal Ottoman sovereignty was very large. But if you remember from last week, the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul generally was content on receiving mere nominal acceptance of his rule rather than interfering or engaging very actively in local governance. This is particularly true for Egypt. Egypt throughout the 19th century, right up to the First World War, was nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire but de facto independent. Reading actually in 1830, fighting a war against the Ottoman Empire, all the while accepting formally Ottoman sovereignty, and that's a peculiarity which also explains the particular role of Egypt in Arab and Muslim affairs. So remember the strong de facto independence of Egypt from a much earlier date than some of the other Arab and Muslim lands. That's in the Ottoman context. The other reason why Egypt plays a particularly important role is simply through its population size. If you look at this graph it shows the current distribution between the Egyptian population and the overall Arab population, and you can see that it's already a very sizable part of overall Arab people is composed of Egyptians. And from this mere fact of being by far the largest, by the far the earliest organized state in the Arab world, Egypt has always expected to be accorded a particular prominence in Arab and Muslim affairs. The third thing to be remembered about Egypt links back to the size, and it's an issue that is not peculiar to Egypt, but we can see it throughout the Muslim world and actually throughout the developing world, is the very high population growth you see in Egypt. Here you see the figures for the latter part of 20th century into the 21st century, and you see here on the left you see the population growth annually in percent. It's a very high rate of growth for the Egyptian population. And we see this throughout the Arab and Muslim world. And as you can imagine, a very rapid population growth causes a number of very important problems both with respect to the labor market but also with respect to the distribution of public services and the distribution of economic growth per capita. And it's one of the unresolved key problems of the Arab world, of the developing world, and particularly of Egypt. And as we'll see later on, it's one of the strong contributing factors to the current upheavals. The last distinct feature about Egypt, and here again, its symbol of wider developments throughout the Arab and Muslim world is the role played by minorities in Egypt, both particularly the Christian and the Jewish minority and of European traders in the Egyptian economy through the 19th and 20th century. Because we now see that these are minorities that existed for a long time and, as you remember from the first week, they were accorded a particular not very advantageous status in the traditional arrangement of the Islamic state. Now in the 19th century, under the impact of European superior commercial interests, these minorities gain preferential access to modern education. Assume, through the better training, now prominent roles in the administration and play a particularly active role in the media and in commerce. So we see that the minorities in Egypt, and that's something that we also see in the other parts of the Arab and Muslim world, are now becoming more prominent in social affairs. And they play a mediating role with the foreign, particularly commercial interests that are now gaining a foothold in Egypt. The other distinct feature of Egyptian society at this time is, if you remember from what we discussed in the Ottoman Context, the Ottoman context relied on a military elite that was drawn from outside. You remember the military slave system that they had, which relied on soldiers, slave soldiers, drawn from the Balkans and the Caucasus. And these Troops, they now, as the system broke down, they now settled down, established families. And so we see in Egypt, a very prominent role played, particularly in the military and state elite, of people of Turkish, Caucasian origin. And that is a distinct feature of Egypt that in the 20th century, through intermarriage, gradually disappears. But in the 19th century is very prominent. Particularly because Muhammad Ali and his offspring were directly dependent on this class. Other feature that we now see in Egypt in the 19th century, and that played a very prominent part in the modernization efforts by Muhammad Ali, is the shift from subsistence farming to cash crop farming. For the producing, in the Egyptian context, cotton for the international market. And this obviously raises the revenues available to the state, but also increases the active role played by the government in the economy. And the way it played out in Egypt was through a variety of functions. The Egyptian state through the actual person of the ruler Muhammad Ali, monopolized both the possession of land and the trading with cash crops and industrial goods. It has advantagious. Effects by particularly strong investments in irrigation and communications, but also it leads to a concentration of landed wealth in a relatively small number of people. And the personal family and the family possessions of Muhammad Ali and his family comprised roughly 20% of all arable land in Egypt. But looking at the national economy, what is distinct now in the 19th century is the very vast increase in arable land through irrigation and resulting from the increased revenue streams that flowed to the government. And we will come back to this point later. We see in the context of this much stronger commercial interaction with the outside world, particularly Europe, we now see European commercial interests playing a very active role in Egypt. Here on this picture you see the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company which is the epitome of a foreign large-scale infrastructure investment in Egypt. And as you can imagine it played an active role in the economy. Again, this mirrors developments elsewhere in the Ottoman lands, and we discussed it already last week. With this commercial presence of foreigners, we see now a shift in the administration and the administration of justice. Here you see in this picture a traditional Sharia court. We have used this picture before. And just as we saw it in the Ottoman area, we now see in Egypt a shift towards mixed courts, and the demand for a modern, rational commercial code. And just as it was discussed in the Ottoman area, if you remember from last week where the commercial code was introduced, we see now in Egypt the commercial code based on the French model is introduced at a relatively early stage. And, then, these mixed courts become overrun by strong demand for the administration of justice. Remember that the traditional sharia courts are unattractive for minorities and foreigners due to evidentiary rules and the discrimination towards non-Muslims, quite irrespective of the premodern, substandard law that they applied. So the mixed courts are attractive, there's a need In the commercial sector for them. And now Egypt is parting ways with the Ottoman empire. If you remember last week, we discussed that in the Ottoman empire it was also discussed to simply import a wholescale national code, and then replace this heterogeneous court structure with a national court system. Egypt actually goes along with this project, something that has failed in the Ottoman Empire, and then led to the Majallah that we discussed last week. What Egypt does is it actually takes the French civil code, here you are, Code Civil, and translates it into Arabic and promulgates it as the law of the land in Egypt. And with this law of the land comes a new national system of courts aimed at replacing the mixed courts and the traditional Sharia courts with one unified court system. And the institutionalization of the Administration of Justice here in Egypt is quite peculiar. It's at a very early stage we see in Egypt the state being at a much higher institutionalization than we see in the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, something that contrasts quite dramatically, for example, with the situation in Iran that we will discuss in two weeks. So, as you can now imagine, this role of deed, this dominant role of foreigners in the economy and in the state, eventually leads to something that we will discuss later, to the government, the state become indebted, eventually falling under financial foreign administration and eventually leading, in 1880, to formal occupation by British forces. And this foreign presence, now physically visible and under physical control of, in this case, British colonial troops over the government, leads to strong nationalist agitation. Remember, in the Ottoman period, nationalism was not an idea that was natural, that existed. It's an idea that was imported in the 19th century, from Europe it developed. So now we see in Egypt the development of Egyptian nationalism. And here on this picture, it's difficult to see but, if you see the flag in the middle of the picture, it's supposed to represent the Egyptian nation, and it shows the crescent of the Muslims, the cross of the Christians and the Star of David of the Jews. So at that time, nationalism was explicitly seen as a non-religious ethnolinguistic idea, just as it was in Europe. And it is at this time also that we see the development of pan-Arabism, the idea of a nationalism that transcends these colonial borders. Here we see another picture of Egyptian nationalists of the period here. So, pan-Arabism is something that we will come back to in this week. And it's a very powerful idea that is based on the idea that everybody who speaks Arabic should belong to one particular political union, and that these boundaries have now developed in the 19th and 20th century, that they are somehow artificial. And we come back to this in a minute. From this natural unity, stemming from the existence of a common language, is something that plays again into the particularly prominent role that is enjoyed by Egypt in the Arab world, and that's the development of the premiere cultural production sites in Egypt. Egypt, in the twentieth century, becomes the center for media development in Egypt. Here, you see a poster of the Egyptian film, El muallem Bahbah, from 1936, or in this one is the film, Raja', from 1945, And, for example, on this picture you see the very, very prominent, almost iconic Egyptian singer, Oum Kalthoum, who is probably, in prominence throughout the Arab world, can only be compared to maybe Elvis or The Beatles. And she died some while ago, but she's still very much prominent in the popular imagination. So Egypt, through the development of a media culture and the dominant media industry in the Arab world, That takes advantage of the existence of a common language is fostering and reinforcing it's claim to so called natural leadership of the Arab cause. Here you see another Egyptian actor Omar Sharif who then is one of the few Egyptian actors that actually become known outside of the Arab world as well. Again, reinforcing this claim of Egypt as the embodiment of Arabness, if you want to say. Other Egyptian things. So, from this, the combination of its size, of it's early De facto independence. Its very early institutionalization as a state and as an administration. The very prominent role played by its media industry which also, reinforces the role of Egyptian Arabic as the quasi lingua franca throughout the Arab world. As you can see from the combination of these factors, Egypt is by far the biggest Arab nation, assumes a natural leadership role for the entire Arab and Muslim world. And this is interlinked with Egyptian Nationalism that develops in the early 20th century against British colonial rule in Egypt. But it's particularly in the interval years, becomes a wider phenomenon. It seeks to unify all speakers of Arabic into one Idealized political community. And Pan-Arabism as it developed in the inter-war years, is both a cultural phenomenon, and here the role of Egypt as a center of cultural production in the art world is important. But it assumes a particular saliency through the now growing challenge of Jewish settlements in Palestine, particularly after the creation of the state of Israel in '48. And the popular sympathy for the Palestinian cause that becomes now the key embodiment of the challenge to the Arab nation seen as being wider as the national boundaries that exist. But the Pan-Arab challenge, the leadership role that Egypt assumes, is also challenged within the Arab world particularly by Saudi Arabia. That is not accepting Egypt's quasi-natural leadership role and particularly its left-leaning secular-oriented revolutionary politics. And contrast this with more right-leaning, more conservative, more religiously oriented politics. And so confronts this Egyptian claim with a counter claim by the Saudis. And this is then played out in the 50s and 60s as the so-called Arab Cold War, and is also fought out in a proxy war in particularly in Yemen here. On this picture you see a Yemeni fighter during the Civil War. Where Saudi Arabia is supporting the conservative religious tribes, and Egypt, here you see Egyptian President Nasser and the Yemeni left-leaning President Al Saleh. Egypt is supporting the left-leaning revolutionary side in that civil war and not just ideologically and financially, but also with the expedition of troops. And as this week unfolds we will discuss the implications of Egypt's role in Pan-Arabism. And then next week we will also discuss the Saudi counter claim. And in the next video we will look a little bit at the other countries in North Africa, so I invite you to come back. [MUSIC]
