Ottoman History Podcast - The Egyptian Labor Corps and the Echoes of WWI

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

with Kyle Anderson & Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In the aftermath of the First World War, the Egyptian streets rose up against British rule during a period of global anti-imperialism, and the voices of the 1919 revolution have echoed throughout Egyptian history ever since. In this first installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we consider how the First World War reshaped political consciousness in Egypt, as our guests Kyle Anderson and Alia Mossallam explore the experiences of the Egyptian Labor Corps and the sonic history of WWI. We examine the adventure, hardship, exile, and abuse Egyptian workers faced serving the British war effort, as well as how the war changed the society they returned to, in the words of one famous song from the period, "safe and sound." In discussing the popular songs of the war period that entered Egyptian national canon, our guests illuminate the ways in which shared songs can be modified and repurposed for new political contexts, drawing attention to the need for reconstructing the layers of context contained within some of history's earliest sound recordings. « Click for More »

This is the Adam in History podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. This episode is the first of a series of episodes on a special theme, the sound of revolution in modern Egypt. Over the course of these four installments, we'll offer a sonic history of Egypt and its political transformation. We'll listen to shellac phonographic records, city street traffic, home cassette recordings, and public protests, all the way up to 2011, when Egyptians took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and made their voices heard around the world, in arguably the most spectacular revolution

of the Arab Spring period. But before we get there, we'll need to take things back a century, to another revolution in Egypt, against the British colonial regime, which was the culmination of Egypt's often forgotten experience of World War I. Here's our first guest, Alia Mousallem, a Berlin-based researcher whose work explores Egyptian songs and the stories they tell. My friend and director Leila Slimane was commissioned to do a play about World War I in Egypt, how it was experienced in Egypt on the occasion of the centenary in 2014. And we had no idea i mean what what was it like in you know in a world war one in egypt and then we started looking for songs that were recorded during this time and we found out

about uh michonne the armenian record producer who was in egypt at the time and how World War I was an opportunity for him. I think he did the recordings at home. It was a very sort of basic operation, but because a lot of the big recorders at the time, like Audion, the international records had to leave, it was an opportunity for him. And so one of the songs we listened to at the time was Naima Al-Masriya's Ya Aziz Aini, Ana Biti Rawah Baladi. But we couldn't make it out, we couldn't decipher it because the recording was so bad. So we just used it as it was in the play and we used a number of songs. We discovered, say, Darwish's song, Zoruni Kulli Sana Marra, was also recorded during the period, and it was about people who are arrested. And we kept it at that, but I was so haunted by this Ya'azi Zaini that I just, it took

me like a year of listening to it on and off in order to be able to decipher the lyrics. And I wanted to know what exactly it was about. But as I deciphered the song, as I did more research, I found so many different versions of it across different archives. So there's this one that was recorded by Naima al-Masriya between 1914 and 1917, during a time where she was singing in Osyut. And Osyut is a place where a lot of people were recruited for the war, a lot of workers were recruited for the war. And there was, in the Foreign Office archives, a transcribed version of the song that was recorded around 1917, 1918. version of the song that was recorded around 1917 1918 and i think it was documented as people were being taken to the war on on trains this is what they sang and yet another version in newspaper

in the 30s where someone was recounting hearing troops sing it as they went to you know to receive their their clothes and to be taken to the depots where they would be transported to the war. In British lieutenants' diaries, as they were overlooking workers sort of digging the railway tracks in Gaza. And in each of these cases, the refrain would be the same, but the content of the song would change, and it would be talking about a particular context or moment and this for me was amazing that you could use one song as that the song becomes a sort of structure and it's remembered in all these different contexts and it's symbolic because it was dispersed across the archives just as these workers experiences were dispersed across the world and across the front and across the archives. An archive of memory, a musical archive, a newspaper archive, a colonial archive.

Their voices were sort of stuck in these different places. Songs from the war period could be heard everywhere in the historical record, in varying forms that brought the experience of an individual singer or group into a collective story that echoed throughout the years following the First World War. And they hinged on the experiences of a group of Egyptian workers whose voices could only really be accessed in this form. Here's Kyle Anderson, author of a recent book about the Egyptian labor corps and how the First World War transformed the relationship between the British Empire and Egypt. We have to attune ourselves to sound as historians when we're studying people who didn't leave behind written accounts, because a lot of times this is kind of the only way that

we have to get a sense of what they thought and how they felt and how they perceived their surroundings. The Egyptian Labor Corps did not leave behind a lot of written records for us like letters home or diaries or memoirs that become the source material for so many studies of the First World War in other contexts. Most of the actual records that we have of Egyptian labor corps are records of speech acts that are embedded in the writings of British observers, oftentimes transliterated in kind of random ways. I try to use these snippets of Egyptian colloquial Arabic that are preserved in British accounts to give us a sense of what the Egyptian labor corps did kind of when they weren't working. And so this includes chatting with each other a lot. It includes popular religious rituals like Sufi zikr or Ramadan festivals. It includes a lot of songs and theatrical productions that were being put on by the Egyptian laborers as they served abroad.

Mundane songs like Ya Zizaini, when repurposed by Egyptian laborers in their daily life, became part of a broader soundscape through which we can learn more about their historical experiences. We'll return to the songs in a bit, but first, some context on how upwards of 100,000 Egyptian workers came to labor in the war effort of Great Britain, which had formally occupied Egypt since 1882. Over a century prior, beginning with Mehmed Ali Pasha, who founded a new ruling dynasty in Egypt, the Egyptian state had come to rely on the conscripted labor of Egyptian peasants. They didn't just serve as soldiers, but also workers on state-run projects, such as irrigation works, or the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s,

during which tens of thousands of Egyptian workers died of disease. Meanwhile, the British Empire increasingly ran on manpower from overseas colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. World War I would mark the first time in which Egyptian conscripts were sent abroad en masse to labor in this colonial system. In faraway conflicts in places like India and the Americas, the British found it kind of pragmatic to recruit labor locally. But as time went on and British ideas about race and race science developed throughout the 19th century, there started to be a whole series of theories about how specific races functioned in different military capacities. Now it's specific racial ideas about who are the types of people who are

fit, biologically speaking, to do work in tropical zones. And even in Egypt also, I think there is a sense of this racialized associations of military labor. When the British import during the Mahdi Wars of the 1880s and the 1890s, they begin to import a number of indigenous Canadians, First Nations peoples, who are seen as being especially adept at navigating ships upstream when they're going against the streams of rivers. sort of racialized set of ideas about who was appropriate for certain kinds of military labor and who wasn't. When they are drawn into the Egyptian labor corps, what's really going on is that Egyptians are starting to be conceived of in similar terms to Indians, Black Africans in the Caribbean, and others that the British have used in these various campaigns. And so we start to see the displacement of that former racialization of Egyptians as Muslims with a new sense of Egyptians as

people of color appropriate for military labor. To staff the new Egyptian labor corps, the British army looked to rural communities of the Nile Delta in the north and Upper Egypt in the south. And although they offered a paying job, the distinction between recruitment and coercion became murky. They started out by using labor contractors, which had become kind of the dominant mode of recruiting migrant labor for private industry and also for state purposes in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. But as the war went on, the demand for labor and Egyptian labor to help in the war ultimately exceeded the capacity of these labor contractors. And so the British had to lean more heavily on the Ministry of Interior, certain officials,

local officials known as Almud, basically like the headman of each village. They gave them quotas every month in a system known as administrative pressure and would say, okay, you have to furnish so many laborers to the Egyptian Labor Corps this month. And the Almud, the officials would start by seeing if anybody's interested in the wage because it is wage labor. They're offering temporary contracts on a three to six month basis for I think it's five to six piasters a day, depending on the specific branch of the labor corps that you are involved in. That's a decently good amount of money. I think from what I can tell, the average that a migrant laborer could have made for working, let's say, in an archaeological dig of the deal was that you would get an advance on your salary, give it to your family, and then go abroad, work in Palestine, work in France, work in Gallipoli, wherever they needed you. And eventually you would be collecting this daily wage. age, obviously every laborer interacted with this wage system in a different way. And I think the big point overarching here is ultimately the wage, even though the wages induced some people to join, it didn't induce enough to fill the quotas. So at a certain point in time, the Almud have to rely on sheer violence and force and compulsion to bring people into the Egyptian

labor corps, people that, you know, they start off by taking whoever's willing to work for the money. And then if they still have people left over that they need to recruit, they just start grabbing people off the streets. You know, they have cops with them, right? Local guards, the Khufara, who threaten violence if people refuse to join up. And in many cases, they did refuse. This led to kind of clashes, and ultimately, the police would force the targeted laborers to join the ELC. Attempts to force Egyptians to join the labor corps were met with resistance that took various forms. The most common way and probably the most instinctual way is just individual resistance, right?

So an OMUD or some of the local policemen come up to you and say, you have to work in the ELC. And the target says, forget you, and starts fighting against this person with whatever they can find around them. So there are examples of kitchen knives and sticks and sometimes guns being used. And then the second main type besides individual is family-based. And that's when we start to see kinship groups, including women, wives, sisters, mothers, getting involved in trying to beat back the recruiting officials. Sometimes it's families that live in single compounds. So there are other kind of buildings nearby that are all mobilizing

at once to try to free one of their family members. And then I was also able to find seven different examples of what I called mass resistance, which incorporated groups that were larger than families at times up to and including entire village populations. So hundreds of people might show up in a demonstration to try to protest against the forced recruitment of somebody from the village. And in those cases, what the village headman would do is make a call to the biggest town nearby and would ask them to send the police. I think in almost every case, the targeted laborer was forced to go despite resistance. The experience of working in the labor corps fostered further resistance,

as rural Egyptians learned firsthand what it meant to be part of a colonial power relation in the British military. They're being shepherded along the journey from their villages to the fronts in places like France and Gallipoli, Italy, Iraq, Palestine. They're really being shepherded the whole way by British officials. They move from the village to the local town, the nearest town. And there they're kept in jail and holding cells sometimes for weeks, you know, maybe even up to a month. And they're waiting for sanitary inspectors, British sanitary inspectors to come by. The inspectors are going on these tours through the countryside and they're stopping at the different towns. And when they get to a town, they inspect all the people that have been recruited to join the ELC. And then there's a process where, you know, some people get accepted

by the sanitary inspectors and some get rejected and sent home at that point. I think there's a height cutoff. I think it's like five foot six. And then if anybody has any sort of lingering diseases or anything like that, they are also not allowed to continue on. And, you know, and the ironic thing here is that a lot of people didn't want to continue on. Right. So sometimes they're faking disease as kind of a more subtle way to escape service. But once they pass the san right? So sometimes they're faking disease as kind of a more subtle way to escape service. But once they pass the sanitary inspections, then they're basically herded onto trains. I've seen Egyptian observers make the comparison to cattle taken by train to cities like Cairo and Alexandria, where they would be housed for a couple weeks.

They would be given their uniforms. They would undergo sanitation regimen, where they would be showered and all their body hair would be shaved off. They would be given de-lousing and other kinds of soaps and other sanitation ideas, making sure that they aren't, I guess, bringing anything from the countryside to the ELC. And as they're going through the sanitation regime, they're also given uniforms, and then they're kind of split up into companies, and companies are split up into gangs, and they're organized along basically like military lines, right? They're drilled.

They have to line up for inspection every morning and every night. And their officer walks across them as they're in formation and checks their uniform and make sure that they're looking how they want them to look. And then eventually these guys have to continue along. For those that are going to France or to Gallipoli or to Iraq, they have to travel by steamship. And for those who are going up to Palestine, which is where the majority of the ELC ended up serving, they travel by railroad. Once the railroad is constructed By 1917, they're all traveling by railroad to get up to Palestine. So it's a long journey, and they are being transformed, in a sense, from villagers into military laborers along this journey. And by the time that they get to the final destination, that's when they're really exposed to military discipline. For example, if somebody deserts or if somebody steals rations,

they can be subjected to a field general court martial. And they were forced to work. They were oftentimes flogged by British officers if they did not work in the fashion that the officers wanted them to. In some cases, Egyptians who protested while they were working abroad were actually sentenced to execution by firing squad. Another source that I came across was a memoir by Ismosefa Daula. He was a Marxist judge. In his memoirs, which he published in 1990, he decided to recount the memoirs of his village. And there was one person who was taken to the war, Eunice. He talks at some point about how they were sort of learning how to circumvent the French, how to deal with the French, how to resist at times when they were being violent, when the French military officials were being violent with them, how to make demands, etc.

And their Reyes was a Maghrebi. By Maghrebi, that could mean that he was Northwest African, or it could mean that he was from Maghreb. But he told them that the only way to deal with the French is strike, to strike. And they tried that out because one of them died in the tent they were sleeping in because it was so cold at night. And they decided not to work until they made sure that their friend got a proper burial. There was generally this fear. You see it in this account. But then it's one of the most common themes

in the recordings of indian prisoners of war this fear of not knowing where you go after you die on the front because you're already somehow lost in the world and i think there was this fear that after you die you're you're further lost by not being cremated in the case of the indian prisoners of war or not being buried properly in the case of the Egyptian prisoners of war. So you don't find your way back physically or spiritually. In this instance, they decided that they were going to strike, that they were not going to work. This led to a confrontation with the French general,

who they called Guinan-Nor. So they were forced to stand outside their tent, and they were sort of surrounded by members of the French military. And they were told that they had to keep standing in the rain and they can't sit down. I think they were told that they're waiting, that they need to wait, and that the general is going to do something and come back. And then they realized that they were just being made to wait for no reason for hours in the rain. And then one of them said, So basically, if you're a man, then sit down.

And they all decided to sit down at once. And this is when they were all shot the he ordered the the military to shoot to shoot um Eunice's whole uh labor corps group it was more like a situation where the where the general told them you know you're not allowed to move and then used the fact that they sat down as, you know, they were told not to move and they moved and they were all shot. And they all fell dead except for Yunus. He fell, but he wasn't dead. And when a Reyes al-Maghribi was told to collect their bodies, he found that Yunus was alive and he told him to play dead,

to pretend he was dead until he was taken to the hospital and there to show them he was conscious and they wouldn't be able to do anything to him in the hospital because of the laws governing wars and prisoners of war at the time and at that point he would be sent back home which is what happened there are records of it in the foreign office archives it wasn't the only massacre just thinking about the one of the arguments that k makes in his book, I mean, in terms of race, these are essentially British soldiers who are taken from Egypt, right? But they are British. They are under the British flag. And Great Britain finds out that France massacres an entire group of workers from the British

military, even though they're Egyptian, in terms of Britain's sovereignty, France just killed their soldiers. It would be fascinating to know how they reacted. If it's as I understand it, it kind of says something about the colonial logic that Great Britain would find them expendable enough. That would be a major international incident. If the French had massacred a bunch of workers from manchester or or you know probably even from australia yeah right yeah i mean it seems like a big story yeah but they were expendable i mean i think there's an article on photography and world war one workers and the, he talks about one of the ways that Egyptian labor corps were used,

that they would be put in boats and put out in, I think this was in Palestine, that they would be put in boats and put out in the sea at night as decoys. And if the Ottoman army was coming and shot at them, then the military that was on shore would know that the Ottomans are coming. So they were literally put out as decoys, for they were quite dispensable. There's a lot of kind of specifically racialized abuse that the Egyptian labor corps is exposed to during their service. While the British army had outlawed flogging of white troops in the 19th century, the British officials continued using flogging for Egyptian laborers during World War I, and this was something that some conscientious objectors pointed out in the sources that I read as kind of being one of the big things that made the British look

like hypocrites, right? Because the British are engaged in this global crusade against slavery, and then at the same time, they're basically treating Egyptian laborers like slaves by whipping them during their work. At the fronts, where Egyptians came into contact with soldiers and workers from all over the world, further experiences of racism and colonial difference shaped the impressions they brought back home. In a lot of studies of colonial troops and workers who served in the First World War, it's acknowledged that British and French officials

were basically racist in the way that they approached these people. But the way that a lot of scholars kind of study that racism is by looking at attitudes, prejudices, representations. I think the argument that I'm trying to make is that studying representations and attitudes and prejudices doesn't really account for how ideas about race impact people who are being racialized, right? Like the effect that those attitudes and prejudices have on the construction of space. So I focus on segregation and abuse, you know, violence, ideas about race that work themselves out on the space of the body. I also then subsume under that the ways that Egyptians were denied footwear in some cases,

or the ways that their diets were regimented and controlled by ideas about what quote-unquote Arabs eat. And I think that it's really by living in these spaces that the British constructed on the basis of race that Egyptian laborers ended up coming to internalize and reappropriate and adopt for themselves a general sense of themselves as being Egyptians and as being different than their white officers and as being similar to one another who had to live together in these situations. There were a lot of migrant laborers in France during World War I, including a lot of white laborers from Spain and Belgium and other parts of Europe. And those white migrant laborers were not segregated. They were not set apart from the French population. were not segregated. They were not set apart from the French population. But the so-called colored laborers, which included Egyptians and also Chinese, Indians, Africans, Vietnamese, whatever, they were all segregated and set apart from the local population. And then in Palestine, the Egyptians, partially because they're working more on the front lines

and they're building logistical infrastructures ahead of the troops as they advance. That's one of the reasons why they're interacting more with the populations, whereas in France, they're behind the front lines and they're relatively stable. But in Palestine, they move as the lines advance. And that, I think, makes it harder to segregate the laborers. But the other thing that contributes to this lack of segregation in Palestine, I think, is ideas about race, when they're working abroad in France or Italy or Gallipoli than they are in Palestine. The First World War was the deadliest conflict in recorded memory. Some 10 million military personnel died in combat or perished from wounds and diseases. The war resulted in mass displacement.

Many Egyptian workers never made it back home. I think it's really important for us to realize how horrific wars are. I tried to work with the British Commonwealth Graves Commission, or the Commission for Commonwealth Graves. I didn't have the stomach to do it for too long between you and me. I didn't have the stomach to do it for too long between you and me. They have a big problem with a lack of number of the Egyptian labor corps, that they don't have proper numbers.

And in just finding the numbers of people who were killed in these wars, you're again reinstating the might of the army, because you know the army was this many people strong. you're honoring which should happen of course people who died but people who died serving not people who were lost by this senseless war or these series of battles that were that they had to fight whether or not they liked it that there there is something about just just insisting on gathering numbers that validates the wars you know that validates and re-justifies the wars in a way as opposed to i feel trying to find the stories that have people's voices that have things like this this like this power this fear um this terror of dying and not being buried the way you're supposed to so there's an archive in

berlin it's in um it's in the humboldt forum at the moment but it's under humboldt university and it's called the laut archiv which is the sound archive or the voice archive. This sound archive is basically an archive of prisoners of recordings with prisoners of World War I in Germany, and this includes the colonial soldiers. There's a significant number of recordings with North African prisoners of war, and the purpose of these recordings was to sort of further colonial interests as well as

for linguistic reasons it really is an experiment i mean they don't shy away from what the purpose is but there is a clear purpose it's and there's an analysis in these there are these personal forms that go with the songs and there's an analysis of the kind of voice, you know, like dark and deep or weak and light. The recordings of the Lauter Archive are vast and varied. They include the voice of a 37-year-old Tunisian POW from the French army who was recorded in a number of sessions, recounting stories, riddles, and these war songs, which became part of a German study on Arabic and Berber dialects in North Africa. So what they would do is they would ask the prisoners to stand in front of a gramophone

and sing a song or tell a folk story without disclosing any information any information about themselves about about the prisoner of war camp that they were in and you know in some of the photographs you see them there you you have william dogan and the other linguists with their hands on their heads pushing their pushing their faces deeper into the funnel so that they spoke or sang or told a story into it. Dilem Dogan and others write in their notes how some of them have funnel fever because they start to panic as they're speaking into the funnel. I mean they could have been claustrophobic but one thing they make fun of is how the soldiers feel like their voice is being stolen by this

device. This recording technology was, you know, it's still very new and so this idea of having your voice recorded and played back at you was something very scary for them but Britta describes how in these situations many workers and soldiers used this moment as an opportunity to tell their story like Sadiq bin Rashid's he talks about where where he was taken and how, but he makes it sound like a love poem. In the Indian recordings that Britta works with, some of them tell very elaborate ghost stories, and she feels like it was a way to warn these linguists that they're going to be haunted. And so they sing these songs, but they're stories. I mean, they're stories about where they were captured, they're stories about where they are, they're stories about what they fear. This was a moment where their voices could be captured, they didn't know who would hear it.

And here you are listening to it 100 years later, and they're trying to give clues about who they are, where they are, or how they got there. As you noted, a song can be old, but each iteration of it is like alive. It's like the storytellers of old who had these old stories as frames, but then would change the story to reflect the situation. And the audience and yeah so they were like capturing something that in many ways was probably like of the moment right even though they were soliciting quote-unquote folk songs yeah it's also about how songs are a very intimate language it's like a coded language like one of the songs that i'm working with now comes from morocco and it's it's very much like Ya Aziz Aini. It's a taadida, it's the kind of song you sing when someone dies, like a lament, it's a lament. And the man sings his own name into it,

you know, like this person is lost, this person is gone. Britta Langa uses a metaphor. Yes, she calls them messages in bottles. Messages in bottles that are sort of thrown out and you just don't know who's going to find them and if they're going to understand you, but it's your one chance to throw yourself out there and wait. While prisoners of war left behind songs as messages in bottles, Egyptian workers who returned home also brought with them songs

that would become anthems of a revolution. After the war, at the League of Nations, the future of territories belonging to the defeated Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires was up for debate. Nominally, Egypt was still, in some sense, part of the Ottoman Empire. But Britain was the de facto imperial power. In Egypt, an independence movement coalesced around the wartime experience. There was widespread unrest throughout Egypt early as 1918 in response to Egyptian labor corps recruitment.

A movement starts like more retaliation starts by Egyptian peasants who are being taken as workers to the war. They start to resist being taken. They start to set the police stations where they're being kept alight. And they start all forms, different forms of resistance to being taken to the war, but also to revolting not just against the British, but also the landowners and sort of feudal elites that were cooperating with the British. After the war was over in November of 1918, recruitment continued. And so protests picked

back up around that time. But simultaneous to this, in November of 1918, a group of Egyptian nationalists, politicians, and intellectuals begins to organize a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, which is known as the WEFT. In order to build support for the WEFT, these nationalists begin touring throughout the Egyptian countryside, gathering signatures to authorize their delegation to represent the Egyptian nation at the Paris Peace Conference. And this process puts them into confrontation with the British authorities in Egypt. And eventually, in March of 1919, the British authorities arrest Saad Zaghloul, who is the leader of this effort, the leader of the waft, and four of his colleagues, and they send them to Malta,

to prison in Malta. And this sparks a series of protests that are activated by the waft's networks. You can think about their arrest and exile of Sazaglul as the straw that broke the camel's back or the spark that lit the powder keg that had already been prepared by World War I and all of the other difficult exploitative aspects of the British occupation. These protests begin spreading across the countryside. One of the big things that they do is they sabotage railways, telephones, and telegraph lines. And I think that this is in some ways related to the Egyptian labor corps, because as I mentioned before, it was really the railroads that were how these Egyptian laborers were

transported out of the countryside. And also the railroads were how cattle and food stuffs were being also exported out of the countryside to fuel the British war machine as it was fighting in World War I. And so I think the particular form that these protests took in attacking the railway infrastructures, I think that's related to World War I. And the way that policies like the ELC, these extractive policies were happening during the war. What's so significant about the strikes is that like Yunus says and like Esmolsefer Dola says that these were peasants. They didn't work in factories. They didn't, but these resistant techniques also, they were relatively new to them. When they were being taken to the war, they described that the way a peasant usually

deals with something like a flood, the way we deal with power is that we circumvent it. So there are the techniques that Kyle talks about in the beginning. In this case, the war is a situation where they learn to be confrontational, not saying that that never happened before, but these confrontational techniques, which are more present in the context of labor revolts, I feel learned without communication, sort of the way there's always this question of how the police stations were simultaneously burnt all over Egypt on the 28th of January? You know, how could it have happened without coordination? if this was a moment, a revolutionary moment somehow, where people came back from the war and were revolting not just against colonial powers, but against the sort of feudal landed elite that were cooperating with the colonial powers to take them to war. There's a struggle that's going on during March and April between nationalists and other elements within these protests. And the nationalists are ultimately, I think, able to establish hegemony in many cases. But this struggle itself is evidence of the fact

that there was a plurality of different interests at play in each one of these protests. And the waft needed to struggle in order to establish hegemony, right? So that means that there were other sort of non-waftist elements within these protests. And I think the clearest place where we see that happening is in the cities or the provinces of Asyut and Minya, which are in Upper Egypt to the south of Egypt. And ultimately, the British are also trying to get a handle on the situation. And so they deploy their army, right? The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, the same force that just conquered Syria and Palestine from the Ottomans, then gets unleashed in rural Egypt. And it's made up of British Indian troops and Australian and

New Zealander forces. And they go around basically crushing these rural demonstrations and killing thousands of Egyptians along the way. And they even use the Royal Air Force to bomb and machine gun crowds who are engaged in protest at this time. And at the same time, the British then free Sadzagloul from prison in Malta, and they start this process of negotiation with the WAft to allow the waft to travel to Paris and ultimately to grant a kind of conditional and very limited form of sovereignty to Egypt by 1922. And so it's kind of interesting to me that the British crush the rural rebellions and then they negotiate with the waft. It's almost like the British themselves are distinguishing between these two aspects of protests. And so I think this is kind of further evidence that there are guiding force and the main force animating the protest movements. Though it would be decades before the end of all British colonial influence in Egypt,

in 1922, Egypt was recognized as a sovereign nation-state. The songs of the war period, some of which were adaptations of older songs, became part of the emerging national musical canon. The song that gets talked about the most by scholars of the Egyptian labor corps is a song by the name of Ya Aziz Aini. And this is a song that was a popular folk song sung by migrant laborers who served in Egyptian irrigation labor throughout the 19th century. And then it was recorded by the Egyptian diva Naima al-Masriya in 1915. A lot of these Egyptian observers write down that they're quite fond of singing this song. And the way that the laborers sang, it wasn't like a set song. There was a lot of improvisation.

The song was more of a framework which allowed for creative wordplay. And so one of the interesting things about Yazeed's Aini is that it shows up later on after the war in protests that are happening against the British presence in Egypt, right? Because after the war in protests that are happening against the British presence in Egypt, right? Because after the war, the 1919 revolution breaks out. And one of the things the British report right before the 1919 revolution is this version of Yazid's Aini that was circulating around in Alexandria and Cairo, which criticized the British heavily for taking Egyptian labor corps laborers away from their families. So the version by Naima El-Masriya, which is just a general song about longing for your homeland, ends up becoming transformed into this kind of nationalist anti-British anthem.

A version of the song may have traveled back with an Egyptian laborer who served abroad, and that this version then kind of took root inside of Egypt itself and spread anti-British themes and a critique of British policy towards the Egyptian labor corps in particular within this song. We have no idea how many workers were taken to war from Egypt, and we may never know. how many workers went were taken to war from Egypt and we may never know but it's equally important to know what that experience at war was like and that's what the songs give us they give you a sense of what it was like to be at war for instance in in the like the different versions I found of Yazeed Zaini there's this one version there's the version where they're being taken um on the train and this one is a sad uh aversion as a version about being taken away and there's a version that was overheard in the 30s and this one

has this phrase so so yalliramek alhawa alhawa is desire um so you've been caught by desire turns or sphere to the combo you know the british depots they'll take off all your rags and give you and give you proper clothes so there was this desire to go to war and this is something that falls out of our archives that people were curious about traveling i mean understanding the sort of desire that goes to war, the shock of being on the front and, you know, and the gruesome experience, the anger when you come back, the campaign to stop people from going to war,

the movement that started by al-Falaheen, all of this has totally fallen out of our modern history and has only come up recently. When I was working on Naima's Naima al-raieh's song, which is a recorded song, it was recorded on a record between 1914 and 1918, I was sort of trying to transcribe the lyrics to find out the lyrics in order to figure out when was the first time this song was sung. Was it really at the beginning of the war or was it in the second year or third year? Because I was trying to put all these different versions I found in order.

And when I finally had the song all transcribed, I googled the first verse of the second stanza and then it turned out to be a whole other song. That whole stanza was was a was was was like a mawail that that and i found versions of it recording but recorded by people's phones in mawailid for instance and the same happened for the third stanza and fourth stanza so i i'd been working so hard to transcribe the song because it was going to be the source of sources this was the first time yaaziz aini was sung and when i got it, it exploded into shards of songs that are as old as the experience of conscription itself, or displacement, or estrangement. And she, or Sayyid Darwish, had somehow brought all these folk songs that they may have been hearing in Osu together to sing that moment. The most famous song to come out of the war period was a song called Salma Ya Salama,

recorded by the Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish. Many decades later, it would become an international sensation in the form of an adaptation by the Italian-French singer Dalida, who was born in Egypt. That chart-topping pop cover recorded in multiple languages lacked political content, But it had its origins in a song about the Egyptian workers who had returned home after the war. Said Darwish is kind of one of the most famous figures of Egyptian modern music and Salma Yassalama written about Egyptian labor corps workers is one of his most famous songs. That's not a song that laborers themselves sang, but it's a song written about

the laborers that became quite popular again around this time, 1918, 1919. And it also portrayed kind of nationalist themes, right? Talking about how great Egypt is and how much the laborers couldn't wait to get back home and those kinds of ideas and it kind of cuts against one of the dominant interpretations of the Egyptian labor corps that was circulating around Egypt at the time, which really played up the forced and coercive aspects. It empowers, I think, the laborers themselves.

It makes them seem like they have more agency. It adds a little bit of a nuance and complexity to the way that we think about the ELC. But ultimately, it is still kind of nationalist, so long as we keep in mind that nationalism was plural and contained a lot of different substrands within it at this time. So here's the English translation of Salma Ya Salama. Safe and sound, oh safe and sound, sound your horn, steamer, and drop anchor. I'll disembark right here. Never mind America or Europe. Nothing is better than my country. The ship bringing us home is so much sweeter than the one that took us away. Captain, I say, safe and sound. Oh, safe and sound. At least we have

something to show for it all. We saved up our pay and are coming home. We've seen the guns and we've seen war and we've seen dynamite with our eyes. There's only one Lord and we only worse off. The thing about these songs is that they don't start and end in any particular place. They were definitely sung in this war, probably in other wars as well. They're folk songs.

They're as old as the experience that they relate. Fayazi's Aini is as old as the experience of estrangement and separation, for instance. It's the same with Salma y Salama. The oldest version I came across was one that was sung by prostitutes in the late 19th, early 20th century, as when they used to be taken to the health offices to be checked. They would be taken in groups and on their way back, they would sing Salma y Salama, Ruhna wa Gina wa Salama in order to announce in the neighborhood they were in

that they were disease-free, that they were healthy. That's fascinating. It got my mind turning a little bit because these workers are probably being tested for syphilis too. So like sex workers announcing that they had just passed their syphilis examination. Like, yes, these sentiments can move between contexts, but actually what that story tells for me is that there was something shared between the experience

of an Egyptian labor corps worker and a sex worker in colonial Egypt. Yeah, and the workers were were subjected to a lot of measures also of sanitization there's a particular way of dealing with them as bodies or the way they were used as decoys there was they were always they were always just bodies and it's the same in um it's the same in the in thechief also. There's one folk story by this Moroccan worker called Al-Lel, who came from a village called Benjrir. And he tells the story of a wolf and a donkey. Would you like to hear it? Sure. It's a story of a wolf and a donkey. And basically, they're a group of workers and

they have a donkey and the group of workers are very hungry. They asked the donkey if he could help them get food. So the donkey goes and he gets food for the workers. And on his way back, this wolf appears and the wolf is an old wolf. And the wolf talks to the donkey about how it's very old and needs help. And can the donkey help him? And the donkey says, of course, why don't you? He says he's too tired to walk, basically. So the donkey says, of course, why don't you ride on my back and I'll take you home.

So the wolf gets on the donkey's back. And as it's there, it nibbles on all the food that the donkey's carrying until the wolf gets home and it hides the rest of the food on it somehow. And it thanks the donkey and the donkey goes off on its way back to the workers. And once it gets there, the workers go, oh my God, you don't have any food with you. And the donkey realizes what happens. The donkey decides that he's going to go back for revenge.

The donkey goes back to the wolf and he knocks on its door and the wolf's wife is busy cooking the food and the wolf comes outside and as soon as the wolf opens the door the donkey plays dead on the ground. So the wolf goes, ha, I have more food and he thinks of how he can pull in the donkey to put it in the stool that the wolf's wife is making And so he ties a rope to his stomach and ties it to the donkey and starts to pull the donkey. At this point, the donkey gets up and runs with the wolf and drags him to where the workers are. And they skin, the workers and the donkey skin the wolf together. They don't say whether or not they eat it. But when I was listening to this, the first

thing that I thought of was Khalifa al-Maghribi telling Yunus to play dead and this tactic of pretending to be at your weakest in order to outsmart the wolf. When I played the story to my friends, Sumaya Ait Ahmed and Nader Bahmoush, who are part of this initiative documenting stories and poems and songs, they said that this story is usually told with a donkey and a goat, as opposed to a donkey and workers. And I felt like in some way, this story is about extraction extraction or extractionist manipulative policies, you know. This wolf on the donkey's back eating

its food is sort of just like the German linguists extracting language out of these workers. And the skinning is just this promise of revenge. You could, of course, argue that we're reading too much into the story and that it's just a folk story about a donkey and a wolf and that they wrote themselves into the story somehow by having workers there instead of a goat. I think that's a reasonable interpretation. They inserted themselves into the story

and what they meant by it is open to interpretation, right? Why not? Yeah. There's an iconic image from the 1919 Egyptian revolution, featuring women at a demonstration. It's everywhere online, often without much sourcing and captioning. It includes the famous Egyptian feminist Hoda Sharawi and other women giving a patriotic speech in the context of the independence movement. I've seen this image so many times, but what I see now after working on this episode and other women giving a patriotic speech in the context of the independence movement. I've seen this image so many times,

but what I see now after working on this episode that I didn't really see before is the sound it contains. Though it's only a still image, through the dynamism and movement it conveys, we can almost hear the voice of a woman standing defiantly, armed raised, addressing a crowd, and shouting through the thin veil that covers her mouth. The photograph captured an important moment when the voices of women, much like the voices

of ordinary laborers who served during the war, filled the streets of Egyptian cities demanding political change. Those voices of the World War I period have echoed throughout Egyptian history ever since. In our next installment of this special series on the sound of revolution in modern Egypt, we'll delve into another layer of that history, exploring the street sounds of Egyptian cities like Alexandria and Cairo during the interwar period. We'll learn how a battle over Egypt's soundscape was part of a larger class struggle over urban space, and in the process, we'll uncover how a new sonic medium, radio, came to play a central role in Egyptian public life. Join us. اشتركوا في القناة