History of Djedet

Empire of Beheira

Lourale ka Maoube

Main article: Lourale ka Maoube

Djaladjie

Main article: Djaladjie

Modernization and Decline

1892 depiction of the Nizam al-Jadid at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Mina.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the colonisation of Bahia brought Beheira into closer contact with Euclea, forcing the people of the Faras to recognise that they had been surpassed in military and economic might. Though the Beheiran elite remained convinced of their cultural and religious superiority, reformers argued that Beheira needed to adapt to the ideas and technologies of Euclea if they wanted to maintain their independence. Surrounded by Gaullican colonies, Beheira was entering a new era in its relations with the north.

In 1840, Emperor Ashraf II sent a delegation of 40 clerics, scholars, and diplomats to study Euclean science and forms of government in Gaullica. Among the delegation was Tawadros Ramtanthanos, a cleric at the University of St. Maryam who had travelled throughout colonial Bahia and Tsabara. In Overview of Verlois, he describes his travels through Gaullica. Having studied developments in liberal thought and the revolutions of the 19th century, Remtanthanos was impressed by the Gaullican constitution, particularly its guarantees of equal rights and constraints on the authority of the king. Noting that Bahia had fallen behind the north, he argued that Gaullica owed its superiority to its liberal institutions. Remtanthanos was an active constitutionalist by the time he returned in 1852. In Foundations of the State, he asserted that Beheira needed a constitution that limited the authority of the emperor and replaced Hourege with a meritocratic civil service. Though Remtanthanos' message resonated with Remtanthanos' contemporaries, Beheira was an autocratic state and his praise for representative government were seen as foreign and subversive by Beheiran elites.

Tawadros IV in 1862.

In 1852, the Nizam al-Jadid, an army of recruits drawn from rural communities was created. Ashraf II hired retired Gaullican officers to train the soldiers to fight with modern weapons and methods of warfare. This was the first standing army in Beheiran history. Traditionally, the Beheiran state relied on the badawi to supply the emperor with Makanian slave-soldiers in times of war. As Southern Makania fell under the control of Gaullica, the supply of slaves dried up and the badawi became obsolete. The idea of a standing army of citizen conscripts was still new in the Orthodox world and was met with resistance. Peasants fearing for their farms and the welfare of their families avoided conscription by fleeing their communities when military recruitment teams approached. The regions of Bashans and Souan rebelled against the draft. Despite the initial difficulties, the situation stabilized. In 1854, the army numbered 20,000 men. By 1864, it numbered 100,000 men.

However, maintaining the Nizam Al-Jadid required revenues that the Beheiran state did not have. Agriculture accounted for over 80% of Beheira's revenues. However, 30% of arable land was owned by the Orthodox Church and its monasteries. The other 70% was owned by large landholders who paid little to the treasury in Mina. If Ashraf II wanted to control Beheira's revenues, he had to control its land. From 1853 to 1859, he confiscated thousands of feddan from the landed elite.

On 8 November 1857, Emperor Tawadros IV read a reform decree drafted by Prime Minister Abdelmesseh al-Dishairi to the Consultative Council. The decree called on the government to reform the tax system, modernise the financial system, and found a national bank to create funds for public works such as roads, railways, and canals. To reform the tax system, the government began to conduct a regular census, introducing northern notions of property by introducing a land registry that replaced traditional tax farms and communal holdings with individual titles. This required thousands of bureaucrats with technical training. During the 1850s and 60s, the government opened a network of schools and college that taught Euclean curricula to train civil servants. In 1860s, all of Beheira's secular and religious laws were codified in Badawiyan, Makanian, and Gaullican.

One of the largest obstacles to modernisation was distance. Compared to the vast territory it once controlled, Beheira was a relatively small country. Despite its close connections to the Gaullican colonies of Ténéré, Meyrout, and Adésine, it was far from the colonial ports of Sainte-Germaine and Adunis. Consequently, the cost of importing advisors and advanced technology from Gaullica was a difficult and costly task that required coordination between independent merchants, colonial administrators, and ultimately, the Gaullican government in Verlois. However, this would become considerably less costly and time-consuming once the Gaullican government began to build railways through Atudeé, Ténéré, and Baséland in the 1860s.

In 1862, Tawadros IV appointed Hassan al-Mahdi as prime minister. As a member of the 1840 delegation, al-Mahdi's firsthand encounter with Euclean progress made him an ardent advocate for reform. During his tenure from 1862 to 1886, al-Mahdi believed that developing Beheira's economic base would offset the cost of important and adopting modern technologies. In a 1864 speech to the Consultative Counil, he lamented how Beheiran farmers sold their raw cotton, silk, and wool at cheap prices to foreign merchants who would ship them to Euclea where they would be processed into manufactured products sold at a price several times higher. He argued that it would be better if Beheiran factories spun and wove these crops to produce products for domestic consumption. This, in turn, would prevent Beheira from becoming dependent on the Euclean economy while giving the government more money to invest in infrastructure and military technology. By 1863, he successfully secured a deal with the Gaullican government to import the managers, engineers, and machines required to build textile mills in exchange for a concession to a Gaullican company to build a railroad linking Ténéré and Meyrout through eastern Beheira. This railroad would later become a part of the Adunis to Sainte-Germaine Railway.

Gaullican Protectorate

Beheiran nationalism

Bishop Sarjoun of Dotawo (center), Mikhail Bestawros (far left), and other founding members of the Orthodox League in 1898.

Coming to terms with Catholic rule, Orthodox reforms and secular nationalists drafted their own responses to Gaullican imperialism. Led by Bishop Sarjoun of Dotawo and Mikhial Bestawros, the reformists laid the foundation for the Anastasis, a movement that aimed to adapt Southern Orthodoxy to the modern world, calling for a new interpretation of the Bible capable to addressing the challenges of the 19th century. In 1896, Bestawros founded the Orthodox League, a political party that hoped to limit the authority of the emperor through a constitution based on Sotirian principles and present a united front of Bahian Sotirians against Gaullican imperialism.

Despite the Gaullican occupation, the spread of the printing press and the telegraph led to a literary revival known as the nahda. Intellectuals from Mina to Souan were actively writing books on Beheiran history and culture and commentaries on classical works of Badawiyan literature. The nahda became a moment of cultural definition and rediscovery that laid the foundation for Beheiran nationalism. In 1899, Abassad Beshada and Harun al-Suwani founded the Nahda Party. Beshada and al-Swuani agreed with the constitutionalism of the Orthodox League but rejected its pan-Sotirian ambitions. In al-Sawt, the party newspaper, Beshada argued that Beheira was a direct descendant of Ancient Djedet and that the peoples of the Faras were a nation united by a common history, culture, and religion. al-Sawt and other newspapers provided the nationalist movement with broad support among students and intellectuals. By the beginning of the 20th century, Nahda, followed by the Orthodox League, was the largest political party in the country.