The growth of the state apparatus in the nineteenth century, which encouraged and enabled the government to intervene on a modest scale in social institutions, also expanded the repressive means wielded by the State and its officials. Control of the population had long been a central concern of the prior Mamluke government: tranquil conditions were a prerequisite for the collection of tax revenues in the countryside. The aspirations of the developing absolutist State under MuḤammad ‘Alī, however, went beyond the mere preservation of public order to encompass the direct exploitation of its subjects in agricultural and industrial labor, as well as military service. Much heavier corvée demands, and the introduction of drafts for soldiers and laborers in state industry, invariably raised the level of state intervention in the countryside and prompted greater recourse to coercion as popular resistance grew. Government officials, present in greater numbers and employing heightened powers, formed an integral part of the new order: servants of the State collected taxes, corralled men and women for labor, drafted men for military service, and even issued directives about the cultivation and marketing of crops.

These novel interventions spawned revolt and resistance among Egypt's people. The more dramatic challenges to state power, urban unrest and peasant revolts, were mirrored during more “peaceful” times by countless individual acts of resistance which shaded into common crime.

The State in eighteenth century Egypt was centralized and fairly adept at collecting the agricultural surplus in the form of land taxes despite the bitter infighting of the beys and friction between Cairo and Istanbul. The ruling beys aspired to the relatively modest goals of protecting state revenues through the imposition of an order sufficiently strict to avoid a slide into anarchy; while parts of the countryside, particularly in Upper Egypt, did elude the control of the central government from time to time, Egypt overall exhibited a high degree of political unity in a period when regional trends had veered strongly toward decentralization and the emergence of many small power centers, such as in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. That the State managed to retain control over most of its hinterland was due rather more to fortuitous geography – the Nile Valley forming a natural and eminently accessible political unit – than to secrets of statecraft. The State's activities stopped far short of active intervention into the lives of its subjects: as long as the land was cultivated and the taxes were paid, the organization and quality of life in the country lay outside the concern of the government.

One of the dramatic changes of the nineteenth century was the gradual emergence of a more active and interventionist State under Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors.

The economic contributions of nineteenth century Egyptian women were by no means confined to agricultural labor; over the course of the century, women worked as petty traders and merchants, as craftswomen, as industrial wage laborers, as property and business managers, and as service workers. Unlike female labor in the agricultural sector, which was usually performed on familyheld land, women in trade, crafts, industry, and service usually worked on the margins of the family unit of production. Their labor did not generally form part of a family-based enterprise, and the tools of their trade were, very likely, their own personal property. Such women could undoubtedly aspire to more independence than the peasant woman tied to a family plot, but, as in the peasant family, their independence in the sphere of economic production did not necessarily always loosen the family bonds of shared consumption. Still, as we shall see below, women with direct and individual links to the market economy could elude, to varying degrees, some of the more stringent forms of family control.

The distinction between the peasant woman and her sister in trade and crafts should not, however, be too finely drawn.

Slavery has never been a uniform, absolute condition of bondage defying historical variation. The North American experience of that peculiar institution, marked by racial prejudice and a lifetime of unremitting hard labor for the majority of the enslaved, has fostered a vision of slavery which often serves as the point of comparison for other forms of unfree servitude. The plight of slaves in Egypt has been described, for example, as “much better than that of American slaves.” Apologists for Egyptian slavery pointed to the greater comfort of the slave, less subject as he or she was to the lash and hard labor; critics of the institution were more prone to see slavery as a monolithic system and Egyptian slaves as little different from their counterparts engaged in slave labor on the plantations of the American South. In both cases, however, the institution of slavery as well as the status of the slaves were assumed to partake of a unitary juridical and social definition, subject only to variation in degree, not in kind.

The dangers of such an approach, which ignores the differences in legal and social status and variations in social and economic roles among slaves in the many societies where some form of unfree servitude has been practiced, have been aptly discussed in the context of slavery in ancient Greece.

I. The courts

Extant records from the nineteenth century sharī‘ah courts of Egypt fall into two main categories: minutes from the proceedings of the courts of Cairo, housed in the MaḤkamah al-shar‘īyyah archives in Cairo, and minutes from various provincial courts, housed in the Dār al-MaḤfuẓāt in Cairo.

A. Cairo courts

The following list, based on indexes in the MaḤkamah al-shar‘īyyah archives, includes courts with extant records from the nineteenth century. Each sijill (register) is 300 to 500 pages in length and contains anywhere from 600 to several thousand cases.

B. Provincial courts

The provincial court records are less complete; the Dār al-MaḤfuẓāt holds the minutes of scattered provincial courts, by no means a consistent or systematic collection of provincial records. The following list, based on the holdings of the Dār al-MaḤfuẓāt, is composed of courts with extant records from the nineteenth century. Each sijill from the provincial courts is roughly 200 pages in length and contains from 400 to 800 cases.

II. The sample

A. Cairo sample

I. The Bāb al-‘Alī: The Bāb al-‘Alī registers were chosen because they record cases continuously throughout the period under study and appear to be complete. One year per decade for the first seven decades of the nineteenth century was arbitrarily selected for study:

Up through the sample year of 1246, the MBA registers recorded a wide variety of cases, including: registration of inheritance, debt and guardianship, proxy appointments, conversion to Islam, property sales, divorce agreements and decrees, family support, marriage and mahr agreements, waqf arrangements, and money payments of all kinds.

Beginning with the sample year of 1255–1256, the MBA registers record, almost exclusively, property sales and waqf arrangements.

The history of women in Egypt and the Middle East as a whole has been little studied. In part, such neglect reflects the general state of Middle East historiography: focus on visible political institutions, diplomatic events, and intellectual currents of the high, as opposed to popular, culture long confined the field of inquiry to upper class males at the expense of studying the role those of another class or gender played in the historical process. But even now, as a new generation of historians in the Middle East and West direct their attention to the social and economic history of the region and begin to write the history of social classes – peasants, urban craftsmen, casual laborers – whose history and culture remained obscure or irrelevant to the orientalist scholar, women are usually nowhere to be found, or receive only cursory mention.

Part of the problem surely springs from basic misconceptions about women's history and its relation to social and economic history as a whole, East or West. Women have always been numerically important in human populations, a sufficiently compelling reason perhaps to explore their past, but the full significance of the study of women lies elsewhere. The history of women demands an immediate awareness of a multitude of forces, institutions, and activities which elude analysis at the level of official political institutions, mainstream intellectual movements, or economic overviews; rather, the world of informal networks, popular culture, and the basic forces of production and reproduction define the arena of women's activities and therefore women's studies.

Source: FBIS, Middle East Section, 23 Feb. 1983, pp. A14–16, and 24 Feb. 1983, p. Al.

Palestinian National Unity:

The battle of steadfastness and heroism in Lebanon and Beirut epitomizes Palestinian national unity in its best form. Out of this leading Palestinian experience, the PNC affirms the need to bolster national unity among the revolution's detachments…

Independent Palestinian Decision:

The PNC affirms continued adherence to independent Palestinian decisionmaking, its protection, and the resisting of all pressures from whatever source to detract from this independence.

Palestinian armed struggle:

The PNC affirms the need to develop and escalate the armed struggle against the Zionist enemy. It affirms the right of the Palestine revolution forces to carry out military action against the Zionist enemy from all Arab fronts. It also affirms the need to unify the forces of the Palestine revolution within the framework of a single National Liberation Army.

The Occupied Homeland:

The PNC salutes our steadfast masses in the occupied territory in the face of the occupation, colonization, and uprooting. It also salutes their comprehensive national unity and their complete rallying around the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, both internally and externally. The PNC condemns and denounces all the suspect Israeli and American attempts to strike at Palestinian national unanimity and calls on the masses of our people to resist them.

Contacts with Jewish Forces:

In affirming resolution No. 14 of the political declaration of the PNC at its 13th session on 12 March 1977, the PNC calls on the Executive Committee to study movement within this framework in line with the interest of the cause of Palestine and the Palestinian national interest.

In June 1982, the Middle East's most powerful military apparatus, the army of the State of Israel, swept into Lebanon in an operation called ‘Peace for Galilee’. As Israeli tanks rolled ever northward, straight through the 40-kilometre limit the Israeli government had originally defined for the operation, heading for the Lebanese capital, Beirut, Israeli leaders spelled out that their principal aim was to destroy the political and military infrastructure of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), which had had its unofficial headquarters in Beirut since 1971. They explained that with the PLO ‘terrorists’ out of the way, they then hoped to be able to impose their own extremely limited form of political settlement on the Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza areas.

By mid-August, the PLO fighters in Lebanon and their local Lebanese allies had successfully repulsed several apparent Israeli attempts to capture Beirut; and despite many near misses, no member of the PLO's top leadership had been wounded or killed there. But civilian losses from the relentless Israeli air, sea and land raids against Beirut, as well as from the total blockade the Israeli army imposed around it, were running so high that the PLO leadership agreed -after receiving strict guarantees from the Lebanese and U.S. governments for the safety of civilians left behind – that the PLO fighters should evacuate the city.