‘I heard it all before’Egyptian tales of law and development

Abstract

This article provides a brutally condensed history of the Egyptian legal elite, tracing their rise to power following the introduction of legal reforms in the late 19th century, their fall in the 1950s, and the possibility of a renewed elite status based on ‘rule of law’ reforms introduced since the 1990s. I argue that ‘rule of law’ reforms had a considerable effect in raising the profile of Egyptian legal practitioners and empowering them as instrumental decision makers on multiple questions of public concern. In particular, I argue that the history of the Egyptian legal elite makes it very difficult to either embrace the rule of law as a panacea or dismiss it out of hand as a colonial ploy.

Notes

*Madonna, ‘Sorry’,Confessions on a Dance Floor, WEA International, 2005.

My thanks go to Tamara Chalabi, Hani Sayed and Chantal Thomas for their very helpful comments.

1 The term ‘elite’ is as notoriously slippery as the alternative term ‘class’ which it originally appeared to augment and/or replace. I will not go into the different definitions of the term ‘elite’. Instead, I take it as a given that Egyptian lawyers have played such a major role in political, intellectual and cultural issues, that their elite status will become obvious to the reader without the need to enter into the hopelessly contested meaning of the term. For an excellent summary of the different strands of elite scholarship, cutting from the classical elite theory of the Italian school to recent developments, see E Etzioni-Halevy, ‘Elites: sociological aspects’, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Oxford: Elsevier, 2002, pp 4420 – 4424.

2 Such was their astonishingly meteoric rise to power that, when the young King of Egypt decided to get married in 1937, his choice for prospective queen was none other than a lawyer's daughter. Five decades earlier the legal profession was so new and its reputation so uncertain that no respectable family would have been willing to consider lawyers as marriage material. See, generally, F Ziadeh, Lawyers, the Rule of Law and Liberalism in Modern Egypt, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Publications, 1968.

3 Historically the legal profession has been singularly adept at assuming an elite status, giving Egyptian lawyers an inordinate share among Arab colleagues who have risen to domestic and global prominence. Almost all graduates of Cairo University Law School, one can easily count among them two judges at the International Court of Justice, one Secretary General of the United Nations, a Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Vice President and General Counsel of the World Bank, not to mention the predictable bevy of Secretary Generals of the Arab League.

4 This article is based on my larger forthcoming book in Arabic, Min al-Izdihar ila al-Inhiyar: Tarikh al-Nukhba al-Kanuneyya fi Misr 1883 – 2006, Cairo: Dar Al-Shorouk. For a more detailed account in English, the most helpful source on the topic remains Ziadeh, Lawyers, the Rule of Law and Liberalism in Modern Egypt. A slightly more up-to-date reference is D Reid, Lawyers and Politics in the Arab World, 1880 – 1960, Minneapolis, MN: Biblioteca Islamica, 1981.

5 For a summary, see Egypt Almanac 2003, Wilmington, DE: Egypto-file, 2002, pp 169 – 262.

6 See generally, JD Wolfensohn, ‘A proposal for a comprehensive development framework’, May 1999, at http://www.euforic.org/rodzend/ma99.htm; and World Bank, ‘What is cdf: ten things you should know about cdf’, at http://www.worldbank.org/cdf/. For an excellent analysis of this shift in conceiving development and its connection to the rule of law, see Kerry Ritich, ‘The future of law and development: second generation reforms and the incorporation of the social’, Michigan Journal of International Law, 26, 2004, p 199.

7 http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.

8 N Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, London: Verso, 2005, p 12. While Bobbio's definition is admittedly skeletal, it nonetheless provide the core set of commitments shared by all strands of lawyers in Egypt today, regardless of their differences in imagining the state's functions as minimal or more ‘social’, or their disagreement over the secular/Islamic identity of the legal system as a whole.

9 Indications of a new school of Egyptian historiography are equally far fetched. For the most sustained attempt at critically revisiting Mohamed Ali's reign with a conscious attention to the human cost of his modernisation project, see K Fahmy, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge Universty Press, 1997.

10 AF Zaghloul, Al Muhamah, Cairo: Dar Al-Maarif, 1900, pp 248 – 249.

11 For a wide ranging introduction, see R Owen & S Pamuk, A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

12 MK Mursi, ‘Kulliyat al-Huquq’, in Mursi, Al-Kitab al-Dhabai lil Mahakil al-Ahleyya, Cairo: Amireyya Press, 1933, pp 411 – 412.

13 See, generally, JY Brinton, The Mixed Courts of Egypt, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

14 See, generally, D Landes, Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979; and J Marlowe, Spoiling the Egyptians, New York: St Martin's Press, 1975.

15 See, generally, N Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp 23 – 128.

16 For the details of the new curriculum, see Ministère de l'instruction publique, Règlement organique de l'École de droit, Cairo: 1886.

17 See A al-Rafi'i, Thawrat 1919, Cairo: Dar al-Maarif, 1987.

18 See A Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798 – 1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.