Pyramids, prophets, and progress: ancient Egypt in the writings of Ali Mubarak.

• Author: Dykstra, Darrell

1. INTRODUCTION

   In the efforts of modern societies to articulate authentic definitions of community identity, the ancient past has variously been affirmed, neglected or rejected.(1) Most states of the modem Middle East have museums, antiquities services, and research institutions which give at least some attention to pre-Islamic periods, yet the act of showing intellectual interest in ancient Middle Eastern civilizations has encountered multiple challenges. One has come from the perspective of pan-Arab nationalists for whom a concern about ancient matters is either a relic of colonial scholarship or an assertion of particularist and separatist loyalties.(2) Another challenge, highly audible and even violent, is explicit in the rhetoric of the adherents of Islamic fundamentalism, for whom "Pharaoh" is an epithet reserved for the worst of domestic enemies.(3)

   While such questions of the use of ancient history can be found in every part of the modern Middle East, Egypt provides a particularly significant example of variety and change in the cultural interpretation of the distant past. Most discussions of modern Egyptian political ideologies acknowledge that at least by the end of the nineteenth century an appreciation of ancient Egyptian history had been made part of the system of meaning articulated by proponents of Egyptian nationalism. A "Pharaonic" component of identity would be significant in discourse about Egypt's national identity for several more decades, but would be eventually shouldered aside by Arab and Muslim orientations.(4) The purpose of this article is to examine an important transition in the conceptual vocabulary of cultural evaluation among highly placed Egyptians during the second half of the nineteenth century. The central figure is the Egyptian educator, engineer, public official and writer, Ali Mubarak, one of the most prominent figures in the Egyptian government of that period. Themes and interpretations that are evident in Murbarak's writings were important contributions to evolving concepts of Egypt's identity.

2. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ON MUSLIM EGYPTIANS

   AND THE ANCIENTS

   The nineteenth century, of course, witnessed a great increase in European interest in Egypt. Artists and later photogge of categories, ideas and labels to use in understanding the relics of ancient Egypt. The choices made from that complex interpretive vocabulary by individuals in specific historic circumstances presumably depended not only on religious orientation but on social, political and economic factors peculiar to the time. The remainder of this paper will examine changes introduced into that vocabulary of cultural appreciation during the nineteenth century, made evident in the work of Ali Mubarak.

5. MUBARAK AND ANCIENT EGYPT

   To begin with, Mubarak often insisted that any person ought to be well informed of the history of his community or watan. For example, in his preface to the Khitat, he wrote that "ignorance of our country does not suit us, nor does indifference to knowledge of the relics of our ancestors."(25) The destruction or vandalizing of material traces of antiquity was a specific and particularly lamentable symptom of ignorance about the past of the watan, which resulted from centuries of deterioration and stagnation.(26) He conceded that whereas past generations of Muslim Egyptian scholars (and Mubarak so clearly took Maqrizi to be a personal model) were attentive, careful, and thoughtful, more recent generations have been neglectful. This perception is explicit in the characters and dialogues of the fictional work Alam al-din, where consistently it is not the Azhar shaykh who gives information concerning ancient Egypt, but Europeans, particularly the British orientalist. Shaykh Alam al-Din is able to discourse at length about Islamic and even Coptic customs, but when it is a question of Pharaonic Egypt, the Egyptians must learn from the Europeans. The shaykh's son, who accompanies his father on his travels in Europe, laments to his father that he had been embarrassed when people at a party asked him for information about ancient Egypt and he knew so little to tell them.(27) Elsewhere, in the preface to Khilasat tarikh al-arab, his translation of Histoire des arabes, by the French orientalist Sedillot, Mubarak frankly acknowledged that if a nation's scholars have neglected something important, one ought not to be reluctant or afraid to learn from scholars who have not been neglectful, i.e., from interested outsiders.(28)

   Mubarak's writings on the pyramids - to consider the topical field which we have already used as a pricis of earlier Islamic understandings of the pharaonic past - are extensive. His lengthy account in the Khitat of the Giza pyramid complex is essentially his statement of record, fitting logically into his topographical survey; he also devoted considerable attention to the pyramids in the dialogues of Alam al-din.(29) The Khitat passage, in particular, demonstrates his willingness to draw information from a wide range of sources. He was familiar with the writing of a number of classical authors, especially Herodotus, but also Diodorus, Strabo, Pliny, Plutarch and others. Of books in Arabic, he relied most heavily upon the Khitat of al-Maqrizi (d. 1442) and Husn al-muhadara of al-Suyuti (d. 1505), each of which in turn incorporates lengthy passages from a dozen or more earlier Arabic sources.(30) Mubarak was also familiar with Europeans who, as travellers, orientalists, excavators, or philosophical speculators, concerned themselves with the pyramids. In his Khitat account he cited, among others, de Sacy, Volney, the contributors to the Description de l'Egypte (especially Jomard), Champollion, Belzoni, Caviglia, Lepsius, Nestor l'Hote, Howard Vyse, Letronne, Mariette, and Piazzi Smyth. His references reveal familiarity with a representative survey of nineteenth-century European work on the subject up to the time of his own writing - which, as he indicated, was 1877.(31)

   In the following paragraphs attention is directed at Mubarak's treatment of two substantive issues - identification of the builders of the pyramids, and clarification of the purpose for which the monuments were erected - and at his use of his soology among Egyptians, a process which by the last two decades of the nineteenth century had attracted a bare handful of scholars.(9)

   One can cite an increasing number of books written in Arabic which deal with ancient Egypt. In 1838 Tahtawi's school of languages produced a compilation of translated works on ancient history, Bidayat alqudama wa hidayat al-hukama, one of a number of publications dealing with topics in non-Islamic history to appear in the 1830s and 1840s. From the 1860s on, more works, including Tahtawi's important Anwar tawfiq al-jalil fi akhbar misr wa tawthiq bani ismail (1868-69), dealt with ancient Egyptian matters. The periodical Rawdat al-maddris published in the 1870s a number of articles and short books on Pharaonic topics.

   The conventional view is that these gradual manifestations of Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt came entirely at the behest of Europeans and followed their example. It was thus a derivative and flawed appreciation - an emotional and conceptual world borrowed from the value-system of nineteenth-century imperialism, and thus inherently dependent and unauthentic. Is the conventional view accurate or sufficient?

3. ALI MUBARAK: CIVIL SERVANT AND WRITER

   Among the writers in whose works ancient Egypt was given a particularly significant place was Ali Mubarak, whose life is unusually well suited to illuminate major developments in the political, economic, social and cultural life of Egypt in the nineteenth century.(10) Born (in 1823 or 1824) into circumstances which would seem to have indicated a career as a traditional...