Egyptian Migrant Peasants in Iraq

EGYPTIAN MIGRANT PEASANTS IN IRAQ. A CASE-STUDY OF THE SETTLEMENT COMMUNITY IN KHALSA Submitted by Cam!Ilia Fawzi Solh for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of London Department of Sociology Bedford College London NW1 ProQuest Number: 10098502 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10098502 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to the Egyptian fellaheen in the Khalsa Settlement in Iraq for their friendly cooperation. This applies in particular to Dm Said and 'Amm Ali whose hospitality and friendship helped me over many a rough patch during the field-work for the present study. My thanks and gratitude are also extended to the many Iraqi officials and Arab friends whose cooperation made this study possible. My special thanks go to Bernice Martin for her guidance and unfailing encouragement during the formulation of the framework of this thesis, and to Adel Sadek for his many valuable comments and his help in proof-reading the manuscript. Very special thanks go to my husband, Raghid, and my daughter, Lina, for their patience and support during the process of writing up my research findings. Above all, this thesis is dedicated to my Irish mother and to the memory of my Egyptian father. Both have encouraged me to appreciate what is best in East and West without necessarily feeling lost between both worlds. They also encouraged me to take advantage of each opportunity in the belief that a daughter's brains are equal to a son's. London, 1984 ABSTRACT In 1975, the Governments of Iraq and Egypt signed a bilateral agreement according to which Egyptian peasant families would be resettled in Iraq. One hundred settlers and their families arrived in 1976 in the Khalsa Settlement south of Baghdad, where each was given a house and the indefinite lease to a plot of land. The present study set out to discover the type of community which evolved in this Settlement given the fact that the Egyptian peasant families were recruited from different provinces in Egypt. It was assumed that the geographical remoteness of the home villages as well as the confrontation with a relatively alien socio-economic environment - cultural similarities between Egypt and Iraq notwithstanding - would serve to diminish the importance of the settler households' heterogeneous provincial origins and encourage the formation of a relatively cohesive community. The majority of the Egyptian peasant families included in the present study have not failed to take advantage of new economic opportunities which have come their way after resettlement. This has necessitated a certain change in social values and norms. It was found that there is a certain selectivity with regard to the extent to which values and norms have been modified in response to the demands of a new way of life after resettlement. This very selectivity has had an impact on the scope of male and female social networks in Khalsa and thus on the type of community of social control which has evolved in this Settlement. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 Notes to Introduction 16 PART I: Theory and Practice 19 Chapter 1 Theoretical Aspects and Focus of the Study 19 1.1 A Theoretical Framework 20 1.2 The Contemporary Egyptian Village: The Multiplicity of its Socio-Economic Setting 28 Chapter 2 Methodology and Problems of Field-Work from the Perspective of an Arab Female Researcher 40 2.1 Impediments to Field-Research in the Arab World: Politics and Bureaucracy 41 2.2 The Researcher's Role and Gender: Important Dimensions of Field-Research 51 2.3 The Choice of Methodology 57 Notes to Part I 67 PART II: The Physical Infrastructure and Socio-Economic Setting of the Khalsa Settlement 76 Notes to Part II 89 PART III: The Egyptian Peasant Settler and his Household 93 Chapter 1 Selection and Migration to Iraq 93 1.1 The Selection Criteria 93 1.2 First Arrivals in Khalsa 101 Chapter 2 The Egyptian Peasant Family 104 2.1 Peasant Family System: Tradition and Change 106 2.2 Division of Labour in the Peasant Household 123 Chapter 3 Social Values: The Old and the New 134 3.1 The Settler Family's Home: the Selectivity of Change 135 3.2 Aspirations for Sons and Daughters 154 3.3 Ceremonial Celebrations: Accommodation to the Reality of Resettlement 168 3.4 Family Planning 182 3.5 Leisure Time and the Média 192 (PART III) Chapter 4 Agricultural Production and the Market 198 Notes to Part III 210 PART IV: The Community of Egyptian Settler Families in Khalsa 228 Chapter 1 Social Contacts and the Visiting Pattern 228 1.1 The Social Network of Settler Wives 230 1.2 The Male World in Khalsa 261 Chapter 2 The Formation of Leadership: Scope and Limitation 274 Chapter 3 Social Conflicts and the Effectiveness of Social 298 Control Mechanisms Notes to Part IV 332 CONCLUSION 340 Appendix 351 Bibliography 363 Glossary 375 List of Charts and Tcibles Chart I: Physical Lay-Out of the Khalsa Settlement 83 Chart II: Plan of the Settler's House in Khalsa 84 Chart III: Kinship Groups among Settler Families in Khalsa 112 Table 1: Settler Wives' Economic Activities on the Land 128 Table 2: Settler Wives' Economic Activities in the Market 128 TRANSLITERATION Arabic words have been transliterated according to how they are spoken in the Egyptian colloquial and not according to classical or literary Arabic, Arabic letters which have no equivalent in English have been transliterated to sound as near as possible to the Arabic language as follows: The Arabic letter ghayn is written gh 'ayn is written 'a khah is written kh zah is written z sad is written s dad is written d theh is written th INTRODUCTION During the Arab League Conference held in Rabat, Morocco in 1975, both the Egyptian and Iraqi Heads of State added their seal of approval to a bilateral agreement designated to serve as the cornerstone of a framework for intensified economic cooperation between the two countries.1 The agreement specified that the Egyptian Government would initiate a campaign to encourage Egyptian peasant families to settle and cultivate land in I r a q . 2 For its part, the Iraqi Government committed itself to building village settlements to house these peasant settlers in and to hand over to them land which they would be allowed to cultivate as individual holdings.3 The agreement further specified that, as a first step, one hundred Egyptian peasant families would be resettled in a newly-built settlement south of Baghdad which was eventually named Khalsa after a village in Palestine. These first arrivals would be followed by other groups of settlers as soon as the necessary preparations regarding accommodation and provision of cultivable land were completed. Both Governments were also in agreement that the short-term goal would involve the resettlement of some five thousand Egyptian peasant families. However, officials in both countries intimated that, at the time the Iraqi Government had signed this agreement, it had been prepared to accept 'hundreds of thousands' of Egyptian fellaheen if they were prepared to concentrate their efforts on cultivating the potentially rich but to some extent unexploited agricultural lands in Iraq.^ The political background to this bilateral agreement must at least partly be viewed from the perspective of Egypt's and Iraq's membership in the Arab League. Both countries are among the signatories of the 8 various addenda in the League's Charter laying down the theoretical framework for regional cooperation between member states.5 The bilateral attempts to put into practice this particular aspect of the Arab League Charter was, from the point of view of the Iraqi Government, a more or less natural culmination of Ba'athist ideology, one of the basic tenets of which is the belief that pan-Arab unity requires the creation of a solid economic foundation.& Various Iraqi officials interviewed for the present study tended to stress the aspect of eventual political unity implicit in such a resettlement project by quoting the present Iraqi President: 'The Egyptian peasant in Iraq is not a migrant. Rather, he is a citizen who has changed his place of residence. The sons of the Nile will embrace the river-basins of the Tigris and the Euphrates with all the affection vAiich we hold for the Nile itself'.? For its part, the Egyptian Government also appears to have subscribed to the idea of Arab cooperation being a sound and worthwhile principle. However, in contrast to the official Iraqi attitude, the economic rather than the political aspects of such a cooperation appear to have figured more prominently. This attitude was implicit in the response of a number of Egyptian officials interviewed in connection with the Khalsa Settlement project. Whatever the degree of the political overtones, the fact remains that the socio-economic advantages of such a resettlement scheme can be said to have been an equally motivating force behind the calculations of both Governments. This project was viewed essentially in complemen tary terms: underpopulated Iraq with its oil wealth and its relatively unexploited agricultural resources would benefit from the expertise traditionally attributed to tiie Egyptian fellah who, over the centur ies, has acquired the not undeserved reputation of carefully nurturing his infinitesimal plot of land in spite of the fact that it has tended to barely ensure his subsistence.

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