Field work in Egypt between June 2007 and April 2008
I carried out my field work in Egypt between June 2007 and April 2008. In this period I focused on two main activities: archive/ bibliographical research and linguistic training.
Archive research
During my stay in Egypt I had the opportunity to visit three archives belonging to three different ministries: Dar al-watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, “Dar al-Mahfuzat” and “Maslakha shahr el-aqari”.
The archive research has been fundamental in order to define the subject of the dissertation and establish the structure of the thesis and its orientation.
The quantity of the material contained in the archives on one hand, and the limited amount of time that I had at my disposal on the other, imposed me some limits. The presence of certain documents, indeed, has been extremely relevant in the process of research field definition. When I decided to study the dynamics affecting the Egyptian society during the decolonisation period, I was aware that I had to find a functional perspective: limited enough to be easy to deal with, but at the same time representative of the society as a whole. That is what I tried to do during the archive work, I isolated a serial of significant study cases that would have become the core of my research.
Indeed during the archival research emerged that real estate matters were one of the most controversial aspects in the relations between Egyptians and foreigners. I will be more exhaustive about this point further on, here I just want to point out that the decision of examine this kind of problems was a direct consequence of the archive research activity.
The archive conditions in Egypt are not ideal. The first obstacle to overtake is the achievement of the access to the documents. You have to undergo a process which is usually quite long, (two months minimum). The permission, once achieved, does not give you the right to consult automatically all the funds contained in the archive. Some funds require special permissions.
The first archive I was allowed to work in was Dar al-watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, the national archive, depending on the Ministry of Culture. The documents and acts produced by the Egyptian Administration considered of historical interest are transferred to this place. There is a large part of the documents concerning the Ottoman period, and great part of the Monarchical and early Republican era.
I was able to start my archival research in “Dar al-watha’iq al-qawmiyya” in September 2007, three months after my first request. The funds, concerning contemporary history, open to foreigner researchers are the “Maglis al-wuzara” and “Abdeen”.
The indexes of the archive are all handwritten, on-line indexes do not exist, moreover the indexes are not precise about the content of the folders and to understand the kind of records you really can get in the archive, a consultation of all the folders is necessary. In the “Maglis al-wuzara” fund there is a part completely dedicated to the Mixed Courts (Mahakim al-Mukhtalata), 12 folders, but it cannot be considered exhaustive. The documents are usually in French and Arabic, sometimes it is possible to find bilingual exemplars, in this cases I compared the two exemplars.
The variety of records is impressive. The documents concerning the Mixed Courts can be classified in three typologies: a) dossier on the employers (from the hiring to the retirement), b) correspondence between the Ministry of Justice (at the time “Wazara al-huquq”) and the representatives of the European Capitulary powers, c) exemplars of sentences delivered by the Courts.
The second fund I was able to consult at Dar al-watha’iq was the fund Abdeen. It covers a time span that goes from the twenties to the early fifties of the XX Century (the last document I consulted was dated 1954). The documents contained in Abdeen are catalogued according to temporal and thematic criteria. Each Ministry has its own section. There is not a section expressly dedicated to the Mixed Courts, but the information about this institution are quite numerous. In the folders dedicated to the Ministry of Justice is possible to find documents of different nature: law projects, reform projects and sentences delivered by Native and Mixed Courts. In the Ministry of Finance section the most relevant documents concern the budgets of the institutions. Once I decided to focus on real estate matters, the section dedicated to the Ministry of Tanzim became important to check the main decisions taken by the Government in real estate matters regulation, and in the planning of the cities growth and in the subdivision between rural and urban plots of land.
After consulting the documents of general interest in Dar al-watha’iq I defined in a more specific way my research orientations and I focused on records that I could find in specialised archives.
Dar al-Mahfuzat is an archive containing records belonging to the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Justice. I cannot precisely say what is possible to find in this archive, I had to specify in advance which my interests were and I had the possibility to accede just to the folders that contained material on the Mixed Courts. I started working in Dar al-Mahfuzat in January 2008. I isolated about two hundred lawsuits that were of some interest for my research among the cases I was able to consult. Each study case was related to real estate issue and was disputed in front of the Mixed Courts between 1937 and 1949. The folders I had the opportunity to consult contained records of the arêtes pronounced in the courts of first instance of Cairo and Alexandria and in the court of Appeal of Alexandria. I wished I could consult the sentences related to similar issues discussed in Natives courts (Mahakma al-Ahlyyia). Indeed the Mixed and the Native juridical systems were deeply related. Some law digests regarding the activities of the Mixed Courts even reports the parallel activities of Native Courts, but as I said above my request for the Native Courts section has been rejected by now, rectius, the Administration still has to express its opinion in this sense.
The last archive I had the opportunity to visit was the Maslakha shahr el-‘aqari, the Cadastre Office of Cairo. I had the access to original exemplars of mortgage contracts registered at the Mixed Courts and to statistics concerning the numbers of estates sold in Egypt during the period take into consideration in my research.
Beside the unpublished sources, the published sources I was able to gather in archives and libraries in Cairo had primary importance. Particular relevance had the publications directly and indirectly related to the activities of Mixed courts: the Gazette of Tribunaux Mixtes, the Bullettin of Legislation et Jurisprudence Egyptiennes (monthly reviews) and the Journal des Tribunaux Mixtes. Others periodicals consulted were: The Egyptian Gazette, al-Balagh, al-Moqattam (daily newspaper). These periodicals witness the lively Egyptian juridical life, and moreover they are useful to reconstruct the mentality, the orientations and even the tastes of the jurists and the audience that was used to read them for job reasons or just for pleasure.
Linguistic Training
During my stay in Egypt I dedicated part of the time to the improvement of my linguistic skills. I was attending Arabic private courses. The classes were finalized to empower my research abilities. The courses were divided as follows:
a) Texts translation, I was mainly translating literature related to my research interests and documents gathered in the Archives.
b) media language, even in this case I privileged historical newspaper articles
c) Egyptian dialect. The improvement of spoken Arabic has been fundamental in order to accelerate and make more efficient the research work in libraries and archives. Indeed in Egypt is not possible to treat professional issues before establishing a sort of social relation with the employer who is dealing with you.