Mosab Alnomire 

A Syrian poet and journalist residing in Canada, Mosab has published a poetry book and several articles in Arab magazines and newspapers. He is currently pursuing his studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.

This article is part of the series “Capital, Technology and Utopia”, which is a collaborative project between Henna Platform and the department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilization at The University of Toronto. You can read in this series also: Building the Economy of Mount Lebanon Through Bargaining by Timothy Boudoumit, The Jaffa Orange, Haunted by Hayley Birss, Muslim Surveillance in China and Japan by Zannatul S. Isaque and The Rebellious Gaze of Abbas Kiarostami by Nora Mezo-Willingham.

Read the Arabic article here.

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“It is in the environs of the Mediterranean that humanity finds its norm. When people venture away from this exquisite lake, be it via the pillars of Hercules or the Bosporus, they begin to turn abnormal and extraordinary… but it is the Southern route, through Suez, that leads to the strangest lands.”

Jules Siegfried, a French politician

 Many people may be familiar with or have heard fairy tales about Egyptian history. In today’s world, for example, one might randomly come across Youtube videos stating that the pyramids were built by aliens, that we are all fooled, and that the truth about Egyptian history is hidden from us by a “big conspiracy.” Egypt has, for a long time, been a place for the “mysterious extraordinary.” A place for exoticism and unleashed monsters planning their revenge. However, this imagination of Egypt as “the strangest land” is not without context. In this article, I explain how and why the portrayal of Egypt as a wild and mysterious place was correlated with progress and escalated after establishing the Suez Canal. I argue that monsterizing Egypt in the late 19th relied on two foundational sentiments: the first was the sense of “superiority” of  European powers due to the possession of advanced technology, which was transformed into an essentialist discourse that viewed Egypt as a backward place subjected to European “re-civilization.”  The roots of this sentiment can be found in the typical Orientalist worldviews that were common at the time. The second sentiment was imperial anxiety. After establishing the Suez Canal, it became the “lifeline” of the British Empire. The complicated “Egyptian Question,” I argue, created space for the anxious anticipation of the future empire in decline, the projection of those fear onto the colonies’ imagined monsters seeking revenge. 

Although many consider the global interest in Egypt to date back to Napoleon Bonapart’s campaign in 1798, it peaked with the establishment of the Suez Canal. Before the canal, Egyptian civilization was a source of fascination in the aftermath of Napoleon’s expedition. The official opening of the canal in 1869 by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps “transformed the geopolitical and economic landscape of the world” (Bonin 2010). Before the Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, the trip from London to India via Cape Town took one year. The Suez Canal and Egypt were instrumentalized as crucial parts of the world by reducing the time to nearly one month. The canal’s construction was the culmination of technological development projects throughout the nineteenth century in Egypt, which included the construction of telegraph lines and railways. These projects enhanced the region’s political value as a vital place, and this led to the coining of the term Middle East itself, which “was born at the beginning of the twentieth century. It would have been unthinkable without a series of spatial transformations in the nineteenth century, including the deployment of new steamer and telegraph lines, railways, and the Suez Canal, which together constituted a new West-East route via Egypt and gradually replaced the long sea voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope” (Barak 2013, 21). 

Standing on the Back of a Crocodile

 The motive to view Egypt as a wild place came mainly from the European technological “superiority” that was translated into an essentialist political and public discourse. The construction of the Suez Canal was not easy, as this gigantic project required tremendous efforts to change the geological nature of the place. This challenge of establishing the canal by de Lesseps was approached within the context of European Orientalism, which assumes that the “other,” namely Egypt, is a monster that needs to be tamed and rehabilitated. Such fashion for Orientalism “expressed a European-centrist mindset, either to further insert Egyptian history and inventions into the roots of European history and culture or to attribute to the enlightened European elites the mission to ‘re-civilize’ backward Egypt by transferring to the area the modern European forces of progress, such a progress having been halted there by the evolution of the Ottoman Empire or else” (Bonin 2010, 44). This belief in European “superiority” was built on the assumption that technology is the boundary between the human and the beast. In such assumption, the “backward other” becomes a monster that needs to be tamed by the technology’s possessor. In reviewing The Istanbul Museum of History and Science and Technology in Islam, Yakup Bektas and Roger Sherman capture this European assumed superiority. “Science and technology,” they say, “became fields to determine the line between civilized and primitive, cultured and barbarous, developed and undeveloped or underdeveloped. Therefore laying claim to an illustrious scientific and technological heritage was more than a scholarly endeavor—it was a political manifesto” (Bektas & Sherman 2013, 631). 

Two caricatures exhibit this sentiment of superiority, viewing Egypt as a wild monster. The first was the cover of the French magazine La Lune (1867), which portrayed De Lesseps standing on the back of a wild crocodile, declaring his victory (Fig.1). The second was in Punch Magazine, 1882, when Britain unofficially occupied Egypt. John Bull, a national personification of the United Kingdom, is trying to tame Egypt, also appearing as a crocodile, with the help of the French emperor (Fig.2).  

 The Anxious Imperial Mind 

Exoticizing Egypt and viewing it as a mysterious, wild place takes another form with the direct British involvement in the region and the challenges they faced (Fig. 2). The cautious British anticipation of the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal, which reinforced Egyptian-French rapprochement and the possibility of undermining the British global imperial hegemony, did not last. Since the canal’s opening, it was clear it would become an arena of fierce competition. In addition to this competition and the limited access of the British to the canal, the Urabi revolt (led by the leader of the al-Hizb al-Watani) took place against “the control of Egypt by foreigners, whether Turkish or European” (Mitchel 1991).

All this led the British to unofficially occupy Egypt in 1882 to secure their supply lines since three-quarters of what passed through were British goods. Egypt, thus, became the “lifeline” and the “spinal cord” of the empire (Bulfin, 2011). However, the local threat from the various Egyptian powers and the threat from other European powers made the British concerned and anxious about what was known as “the Egyptian Question.” Imperial anxiety echoed in the written and visual arts. Although this kind of literature existed before and included exotic mummies stories, it escalated between 1860-1914, marking the establishment of the canal in 1869 and later the occupation of Egypt by Britain in 1882. This peak included new themes, such as curses and retributive invasion (Bulfin, 2011). Gut Boothby’s graphic novel Pharos the Egyptian is one of the most popular works. The novel reacts to “the Egyptian Question” of the time. The protagonist of this novel is Pharos, a high priest of ancient Egypt who invades England to take revenge as a response to the British colonization and theft of Egyptian antiquities (Fig.3).

Pharos, who represents the Egyptian spirit, aims to exterminate the English by spreading a plague among them, threatening the empire from the heart of its capital, and moving from one place to another with a suspicious look in his eyes (Fig.4). This tale of revenge illustrates the sense of anxiety that the Egyptian issue engendered in the colonial imagination. 

Literary work obsessed with counterattacking the empire falls within a broader context related to the geopolitical developments experienced by England during the Victorian era. In the late nineteenth century there was a sense that English imperial power was declining and a tremendous danger would come from the colonies. The popular literature at that time reflected the spirit of suspicion and fear of imperial decline featuring stories of imminent invasions by savage forces such as cannibals, vampires, insects, and aliens. These stories fall into what Stephen Arata called “reverse colonial narratives,” which involve primitive people from the empire’s periphery coming to its center to wreak havoc and violence (Arata 1990). In keeping with the general sentiment of the late-Victorian period, “detective fiction from the 1880s and 90s responds to the project of empire by expressing anxiety and uncertainty about its potentially negative consequences” (Clarke 2013). 

Conclusion 

Examining colonial history in the late 19th century allows us to see the overlapping aspects of the Orientalist views of that time. One of the most important aspects worth diving into is the complex relationship between the colonial project, centered around imposing hegemony over places and peoples, and economic megaprojects. A closer look at this history illustrates that the idea of progress has a fundamental role in shaping political discourses and literary trends among the dominant powers. Establishing the Suez Canal and its vital role in the global economy was an example of this overlap, that created and reinforced the impression that Egypt, like other colonies, was a mysterious and “wild” place. One can probably argue that these European views of “others” still impact the politics of today’s postmodern Western world, whose fear of “wild foreign invaders” translates into bodies floating in the Mediterranean. 

Bibliography 

Ailise Bulfin. “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The Curse of the Suez Canal.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 54, no. 4 (2011): 411-443. muse.jhu.edu/article/445326.

Clare Clarke. “Imperial Rogues: Reverse Colonization Fears in Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers and Late-Victorian Detective Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 3 (2013): 527–45. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150313000089.

Guy Boothby. Pharos the Egyptian: Illustr. by John H. Bacon. London: Ward, Lock, 1899.

Hubert Bonin. History of the Suez Canal Company, 1858-2008 (Geneva, 2010): 33-58.

La Lune, (29 September 1867).

On Barak. On Time, Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (California UP, 2013).

Punch, 82 (24 June 1882), 297

Stephen Arata. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621–45. Google Scholar

Timothy Mitchell. Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 137.