Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800-1952
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Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800-1952
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Overview
This richly textured social history recovers the voices and experiences of poor Egyptians--beggars, foundlings, the sick and maimed--giving them a history for the first time. As Mine Ener tells their fascinating stories alongside those of reformers, tourists, politicians, and philanthropists, she explores the economic, political, and colonial context that shaped poverty policy for a century and a half.
While poverty and poverty relief have been extensively studied in the North American and European contexts, there has been little research done on the issue for the Middle East--and scant comprehensive presentation of the Islamic ethos that has guided charitable action in the region. Drawing on British and Egyptian archival sources, Ener documents transformations in poor relief, changing attitudes toward the public poor, the entrance of new state and private actors in the field of charity, the motivations behind their efforts, and the poor's use of programs created to help them. She also fosters a dialogue between Middle Eastern studies and those who study poverty relief elsewhere by explicitly comparing Egypt's poor relief to policies in Istanbul and also Western Europe, Russia, and North America.
Heralding a new kind of research into how societies care for the destitute--and into the religious prerogatives that guide them--this book is one of the first in-depth studies of charity and philanthropy in a region whose social problems have never been of greater interest to the West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400844357 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800â"1952
By Mine Ener
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2003 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4435-7
CHAPTER 1
BENEVOLENCE, CHARITY, AND PHILANTHROPY
REMARKING ON his travels in the Ottoman Empire in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Englishman Thomas Thomson described how Islam was imbued with a genuine spirit of piety and noted that as a religion it was best characterized by its acts of public utility. Thornton was impressed by the benevolent works he saw all around him: the fountains that provided clean water to townspeople and villagers, the stately mosques in the capital, Istanbul, and the care and respect that he saw neighbors and strangers express for one another. The sum of all that Thornton noticed was Islamic society's ideal imperative to take care of its members.
This introductory chapter explores the structures that existed to provide for the poor in Islamic societies, beginning with an overview of the avenues of care that the poor could pursue. It then turns to a discussion of some of the silences in contemporary scholarship on Middle East poor relief and illustrates how transformations in early-nineteenth-century Egypt and the resulting documentation on this era and subsequent decades provide us with important new insights on state involvement in poor relief. The chapter concludes with a methodological and theoretical discussion to highlight the ways in which this book — exploring the new attitudes, new policies, and new actors in the field of poor relief — gains from and complements our understanding of poor relief in the context of the Middle East, North America, and Europe.
* * *
Ihsan (beneficence, generosity) and sadaqa (almsgiving) are core features of Islamic societies. In addition to the requirement that Muslims pay an alms tax (zakat), the Quran and the Hadith (sayings and actions attributed to the prophet Muhammad) frequently call on the believers to care for the needy among their members. Although charity has connotations specific to the Christian world, throughout this book I utilize this term and describe forms of assistance and care for the needy as "charitable acts." To better capture the meaning of ihsan — meaning generosity or benevolence — for an English-speaking audience, I interchange the translation of this term as "charity and benevolence." However they might be translated, the meaning of these words, as will become clear, is grounded in Islamic prerogatives of caring for the needy. The opening pages of this chapter explores how a range of ideological, cultural, and physical aspects of Islamic society were intended to ensure that all of its members received care.
From birth to young adulthood, the family was the first bulwark of safety and security and the primary site of socialization. As a child matured, he or she contributed to the family's income; depending on the circumstances, marriage could mean the loss of that child's participation in the original family unit; as the parents advanced in age, children were expected to care for them.
But changes throughout a person's life cycle could endanger the security and well-being of even those who had once had adequate means of support. For instance, parents relied on their children to support them in their old age, but when migration, disease, death, or natural disasters took such forms of assistance away from them, the elderly became dependent on relatives or members of their community. Women and children were particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in income and the weakening of support networks. Divorce or the death of a spouse could mean that women frequently returned for assistance to their families. Hence, for women, more than for men, it was imperative to stay close to networks of support.
Outside of one's immediate family, those in need of assistance could also look to their broader kin network. Relatives provided monetary assistance and training to nephews and nieces and, when necessary, took in their orphaned kin. Intermarriage (cousin to cousin) enabled land and inheritances to stay in the family and ensured a solid network of support when needed.
If a person in need was without relatives or family, or if the support they provided was insufficient, she or he could next turn to the neighborhood and community. Neighbors watched out for their fellow neighbors, with richer members of the community distributing food and clothing on religious occasions. The more well off set up tables during the month of Ramadan to serve dinners marking the breaking of the fast (iftar) and distributed an allotment of meat and clothing to poorer families on the occasion of the Id al-Fitr (Feast of Breaking the Ramadan Fast) and Id al-Adha (Feast of Immolation). Some wealthier families even went so far as to adopt poorer families who expected, given a sense of moral economy, forms of assistance. In rural areas of Turkey, through to the present, neighbors still assist nonrelatives; in previous centuries, urban areas' support provisions included guilds, which provided mutual aid to their members.
Another means of receiving aid — and also a means of a livelihood — was begging. In cities such as Cairo or Istanbul, beggars were sure to acquire at least a minimum subsistence, given the charity of these cities' inhabitants. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Flemish diplomat residing in Istanbul in the sixteenth century, noted how beggars forced on passersby "a tallow candle, a lemon, or a pomegranate, for which they expect double or treble its value, that so by pretense of selling they may avoid the disgrace of asking." Other beggars seemed less inhibited. At Istanbul mosques in the 1830s, Reverend Walsh saw "crowds of needy persons," to whom members of the congregation gave "liberal alms" as they entered and left. Baroness Minutoli, visiting Egypt in the early 1820s, remarked that the numerous beggars of Cairo were sure to receive food from owners of shops, and in this manner they could easily survive.
Since almsgiving was never intended to be ostentatious and was not a means to call attention to one's benevolence in public, documenting its practice is difficult. "Charity," noted Thornton, citing the Persian poet Jami, "was comparable to musk." Its substance, "though concealed from the sight, is discovered by the grateful odour which it diffuses."
"Islamic society" in the Middle East comprised a multiethnic and multireligious civilization. Within this society, from the era of the Umayyad Dynasty through the Ottoman Empire, in a geographic sweep of territory extending from Islamic Spain to India and beyond, each religious community had the responsibility of caring for its needy. To have fallen into poverty, as Mark Cohen shows in his analysis of requests for assistance by the poor found in the Cairo Geniza, brings shame to the poor person. Most assuredly, to have one's religious community members visible among the "public poor," I would argue, could bring shame upon the entire community, for that meant that they proved themselves unable to protect their own members. In addition to hiding the shamefaced poor, as Abraham Marcus shows, ensuring care for the poor members of their communities was intended as protection against conversion: minority religious groups' impoverished members might be tempted to convert to escape the financial burden of their poll taxes.
Family members felt a moral obligation to their needy kin, but the necessity of providing for their dependents was also due to a need to hide the impoverishment afflicting the family from people outside of the family. Since caring for one's family's destitute members was such a private matter, it is difficult to find sources delineating its practice.
A more visible means of assisting the needy, a practice utilized by private persons as well as rulers and statesmen, was the creation of religious endowments. A person creating a religious endowment designated the profits from land or other real estate (such as shops), to go toward a charitable project. Since the creation of a religious endowment was both religious and contractual, written records known as waqfiyya remain. These documents provide important information on the founder's goals in creating a religious endowment, the property that would go toward its establishment and upkeep, and detailed notes on the administration of funds. Given that many of the targets of religious endowments went toward buildings, such as mosques, schools, and even hospitals, physical evidence of this form of charity remains with us to the present day.
The most physically imposing institutions funded by religious endowments — and the most thoroughly researched structures — are those established by rulers, statesmen, and other prominent people in Islamic history. But private persons also created religious endowments. All endowments, whether established by the state or by private individuals, fulfilled a pious obligation: the founder of a religious endowment brought him- or herself closer to God by providing for the poor.
The revenues from religious endowments could be directed toward the endower's family (waqf ahli) as well as the community as a whole (waqf khayri), but all religious endowments were ultimately intended to serve the community. In this manner, they were directed toward a variety of services and institutions. The institutions funded by awqaf could be buildings such as schools, mosques, and hospitals; or they could consist of services, such as prayers on religious occasions and the distribution of food and water. Given the possibility of the extinction of family lineages due to disease, infant mortality, and overall low life expectancies, even ahli religious endowments (endowments designating family beneficiaries first and then, ultimately, the community's poor) were likely to benefit the larger community within a few generations. Private individuals frequently designated a prominent institution (such as an imperial waqf) as their ultimate beneficiary. As Miriam Hoexter has shown, a populace's trust in the sound management of a religious endowment could be measured by the number of private persons who named a larger institution (such as the Waqf al-Haramayn in Algiers) as the ultimate beneficiary of their endowments.
Religious endowments served numerous personal economic ends. Theoretically, waqf property was not subject to taxation and could not be seized by the state. Designating one's heirs as beneficiaries or managers of religious endowments prevented property from being reappropriated by the state or divided up following death and enabled specific family members to profit from the endowments. Women established religious endowments so as to "safeguard their own property and its income from encroachment by their husbands and their husbands' families." As Carl Petry argues, during times of economic or political instability, the designation of properties as religious endowments was intended to protect the properties from state confiscation and hence enabled individuals such as Mamluk emirs, the military elite (the Mamluks ruled Egypt between 1250 and 1517), to not only amass large amounts of property, but also maintain this wealth after their fall from power, thus allowing them to pass on these riches to their own progeny.
Institutions funded through religious endowments also benefited their founders in other ways. As Adam Sabra argues, Mamluk sultans included tombs for themselves in the institutions they funded. Those who attended the mosque — or hospital, Sufi lodge, or school — offered prayers for the founder and his descendants.
The ruling elite's creation of religious endowments also served political purposes. In creating institutions for the poor, as we will see later, they drew attention to themselves as benefactors. Their cognizance of the political import of their actions is evident in the strategic placement of the institutions they established and in royal ceremonies displaying their beneficence. However, as I argue, while acknowledging the political purposes of endowments, we must not lose sight of how the creation of endowments, grounded in religion and piety, also served the needs of a society.
Imperial Forms of Assistance to the Poor
Until recently, scholars have primarily focused on how the creation of religious endowments fulfilled economic ends. However, Paula Sanders's work on the Fatimids, Adam Sabra's book on poverty and charity in Mamluk Egypt, and works on the Ottoman period by Kenneth Cuno, Halil Inalcik, Leslie Peirce, Amy Singer, and Bahaeddin Yediyildiz have revealed the extensive public services that awqaf provided and the ways in which imperial ceremonies and other practices assisted the poor.
Our most detailed records of religious endowments are not available until the Mamluk period. However, for the era of the Fatimids, a Shi'ite dynasty that ruled Egypt from 969 to 1171, accounts of their ceremonial practices show how imperial largesse was extended to the populace at royal ceremonies, religious celebrations, and seasonal festivities.
As Sabra shows, although the Mamluks' role in poor relief constituted primarily a safety net (rather than being a means to ameliorate poverty), the services they provided were extensive. In the capital of Cairo, Mamluk sultans established mosques, Sufi institutions, schools, and hospitals; they arranged the burial of the dead (during times of plague); and they attempted to implement price controls and distribute grain during times of scarcity. Endowments by the military elite included funds for the distribution of bread and water to the poor throughout the year.
Building on the models and ideals of beneficence of prior Islamic rulers, Ottoman imperial religious endowments established by rulers, statesmen (administrators, governors, and important personages in various regions), and their families enabled the construction of buildings and the provisioning of services that benefited the general public as well as people who were identified as being particularly needy of assistance. They funded the vast infrastructure necessary for commerce and trade as well as the very sanitation apparatuses of cities and towns. Sabils (fountains), set along public thoroughfares, granted all who passed clean water and refreshment. Bridges were founded and maintained through religious endowments, as were waterworks. A key characteristic of these institutions was how in the words of Busbecq, they "helped not only everyone, but everyone equally."
Caravansaries and Sufi lodges provided temporary shelter, a meal, and drinking water. Mosques were another example of a public institution that Ottoman rulers and statesmen founded and supported through religious endowments. These buildings served as more than places of worship; they also were places in which the weary could rest and wash. Attached to the more prominent and richly endowed mosques were vast complexes that housed charitable establishments such as soup kitchens, shelters, schools, and, in some cases, hospitals.
Mosque complexes, founded and maintained through religious endowments, were at the center of society, both physically and in terms of being a central point for the distribution for services. The Fatih mosque complex of Istanbul, established by Mehmed II (ruled 1444–46, 1451–81), illustrates the centrality of such an institution. In addition to serving as a place of worship, this complex initially housed the treasury (Bayt al-Mal) that allocated pensions to disabled soldiers and the widows and children of soldiers killed in combat. It also served as a distribution point for food and services to the needy and orphans in its most immediate neighborhood.
Ottoman rulers, women of the royal family, and prominent officials not only endowed religious institutions such as mosques and Quran schools but also erected and supported Sufi lodges as a demonstration of their piety and religious commitments. Given their asceticism and renouncement of material possessions, Sufis were referred to as "poor" (faqir; pl. fuqara) and were closely associated with poverty and mendicancy. They also helped care for the needy. Sufi orders gave assistance to the poor in thirteenth-century Seljuq Anatolia, and in Ottoman Anatolia their lodges provided care for the mentally ill. In late-seventeenth-century Ottoman Egypt, Sufi orders managed hospitals that cared for the insane, the government — according to the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi — having previously confiscated the funds that allowed these institutions to function. Sufi lodges in Tunis gave assistance to the poor, serving as a distribution point for food and, in some instances, sheltering those who had no other means of support. Those of nineteenth-century Egypt also functioned as shelters for impoverished nonmembers. Although Sufi lodges continued to serve members and nonmembers during this period, the Egyptian government's use of the term takiyya to refer to state-run poorhouses reflects its appropriation of these lodges' traditional function.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Managing Egypt's Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800â"1952 by Mine Ener. Copyright © 2003 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations viiPreface: Finding Egypt's Poor ix
Acknowledgments xxvii
I
Benevolence, Charity, and Philanthropy 1
II
Discerning between the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor 26
III
Among the Poor of Takiyyat Tulun 49
IV
The Spectacle of the Poor 76
V
The Future of the Nation 99
VI
Conclusion: From "the Poor" to "Poverty" 134
Notes 145
Bibliography 175
Index 191
What People are Saying About This
At a time when attention is newly focused on social problems in the Middle East, Ener's book examines poor relief in Egypt over the course of a century and a half. While many have spoken about the need to write history 'from below,' she shows how this ought to be done. In the process, she retrieves the stories of Egyptian men and women, giving the poor faces and names within a narrative that is clear, accessible, and polished.
— Beth Baron, City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York
In this thorough and imaginative study, Ener examines the treatment of the destitute in a Middle Eastern country. Placing charity in a broad context, she shows how philanthropic enterprises became political instruments, how state and private charity interacted, and how poor people used the institutions provided for their care and discipline. Her book raises questions of wide interest and will appeal to historians of poor relief in any society.
— Brian Pullan, University of Manchester
"At a time when attention is newly focused on social problems in the Middle East, Ener's book examines poor relief in Egypt over the course of a century and a half. While many have spoken about the need to write history 'from below,' she shows how this ought to be done. In the process, she retrieves the stories of Egyptian men and women, giving the poor faces and names within a narrative that is clear, accessible, and polished."—Beth Baron, City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York"Ener's book sits on the crest of a new wave of poverty/charity studies in Middle Eastern history. Among its most innovative features is its use of Egyptian police archives alongside literary sources that round out and give context to this fascinating data. The book also relates poverty and poor relief to larger issues of modern Egyptian history: state-building, national consciousness, modernization, colonialism, democratization, associational life, the role of religion in charity, and the role of women in society."—Mark Cohen, Princeton University"In this thorough and imaginative study, Ener examines the treatment of the destitute in a Middle Eastern country. Placing charity in a broad context, she shows how philanthropic enterprises became political instruments, how state and private charity interacted, and how poor people used the institutions provided for their care and discipline. Her book raises questions of wide interest and will appeal to historians of poor relief in any society."—Brian Pullan, University of Manchester
Ener's book sits on the crest of a new wave of poverty/charity studies in Middle Eastern history. Among its most innovative features is its use of Egyptian police archives alongside literary sources that round out and give context to this fascinating data. The book also relates poverty and poor relief to larger issues of modern Egyptian history: state-building, national consciousness, modernization, colonialism, democratization, associational life, the role of religion in charity, and the role of women in society.
— Mark Cohen, Princeton University
Recipe
"At a time when attention is newly focused on social problems in the Middle East, Ener's book examines poor relief in Egypt over the course of a century and a half. While many have spoken about the need to write history 'from below,' she shows how this ought to be done. In the process, she retrieves the stories of Egyptian men and women, giving the poor faces and names within a narrative that is clear, accessible, and polished."—Beth Baron, City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York
"Ener's book sits on the crest of a new wave of poverty/charity studies in Middle Eastern history. Among its most innovative features is its use of Egyptian police archives alongside literary sources that round out and give context to this fascinating data. The book also relates poverty and poor relief to larger issues of modern Egyptian history: state-building, national consciousness, modernization, colonialism, democratization, associational life, the role of religion in charity, and the role of women in society."—Mark Cohen, Princeton University
"In this thorough and imaginative study, Ener examines the treatment of the destitute in a Middle Eastern country. Placing charity in a broad context, she shows how philanthropic enterprises became political instruments, how state and private charity interacted, and how poor people used the institutions provided for their care and discipline. Her book raises questions of wide interest and will appeal to historians of poor relief in any society."—Brian Pullan, University of Manchester