Waste, work and religion in medieval Cairo: How Cairo's dirtiest professions were (and still are) anchored in religious inequality

Anchoring innovation refers to the inclusion of recognisable and culturally familiar elements (anchors) in agendas of change. As a versatile analytical tool, ‘anchoring’ helps us to see and understand how authorities make use of the familiar to smoothly enforce the new from above. But anchoring can also describe processes that originate from below. Social groups of movements may explain who they are and what they want in reference to historical or local stories, personalities, physical space, and other cultural carriers of meaning.

A question relevant to my research is whether anchoring can also exist in the space between top-down and bottom-up: not as a strategic tool for change, but as a passive point of attachment that holds things together. In this short entry, I will explore the extent to which social subjects in a society can be anchored, passively, to an intersubjectively intelligible system of cultural meaning and social hierarchy simply because they are what they are. The goal, if we can speak of a goal in a context without clear intention, would be to keep things from changing rather than facilitate change.

My research into those working in the waste processing industries of medieval Cairo would provide a case study for this. In Cairo, there is a longue durée history of marginalised groups who carry out the dirtiest job of them all: collecting the refuse, litter and garbage produced by the city in enormous quantities on a daily basis, from the modern Zabbaleen (from Arabic zabāla, ‘rubbish’, ‘garbage’), Cairo's informal garbage men living on the city's shanty-town outskirts today, to the kannāsūn (from Arabic kannās, ‘sweeper’, ‘dung collector’), the medieval city's waste workforce, who collected the ‘night soil’ from the well-to-do houses and swept the streets after the markets closed.

A garbage truck driving through the streets of the Zabbaleen neighborhood in Manshīyat Nāṣir, Muqaṭṭam, Cairo. By Fabian Deter, CC BY-SA 3.0 

In the Middle Ages, as well as today, these waste workers’ social reputation was as low as it could get, even though they provided a crucial service for the city. Their social identity was based, first and foremost, on their daily labour. By working with waste, including excrement, produced by more affluent people than themselves, they reproduced their own social marginality. Marco Armiero’s concept of ‘wasting’, though coined for our modern capitalist world, offers better insight into the mechanisms behind this. This concept highlights how waste is not merely an environmental problem but also a mechanism of capitalist production that alienates people and creates and maintains social inequalities. The everyday reality in which kannāsūn found themselves  — and the Zabbaleen continue to find themselves today — illustrates how the burdens of waste are unevenly distributed, creating ‘waste relations’ that marginalise certain people while making their labour indispensable in service of others.

In addition to Amiero’s concept, ‘anchoring’ may help us understand how culturally intelligible categories overlapped with these ‘waste relations’ and made them acceptable to wider audiences. Intersectionality plays an important role here. Multiple marginal identities stacked on top of each other provided multiple points through which the marginality of the kannāsūn was inscribed into a larger social or sociopolitical order. Their identity itself provided the anchorage for understanding, and ultimately justifying, the dire social circumstances in which these people lived. In Cairene society from the Fatimids (909-1171) onward, religious identity, I argue, provided a particularly heavy anchor in this respect.

Although the medieval kannāsūn were not as religiously homogeneous as the Zabbaleen today, who are almost all Coptic Christians, they were certainly not uniformly Muslim. Evidence from the Cairo Genizah, as well as other sources, suggests that this group included a higher proportion of workers with a dhimmī background, Jews and Christians in this case, than other professions did. This is also in line with what we know from other ‘dirty’ professions. Also within the tanning industry, in which the hides of slaughtered animals are transformed into leather using a pungent mixture of chemicals, non-Muslim identities were overrepresented.

There is no hard rule in Islamic jurisprudence that would preclude Muslims from entering into these professions. Excrement is impure, of course, but ablution can solve this. Again, the same applies to other ‘dirty’ professions, with the exception perhaps of pig butchers. Tanning, too, is in theory open to Muslims. There is even a religious discourse in which the work of tanners is praised for purifying impure goods. At the same time, ethical writings such as al-Ghazālī's Iḥyā ʿUlūm al-Dīn present a clear normative framework, in which the kannāsūn (and tanners) are classified as inferior members of society. This evaluation is not only based on economic or practical judgement; sweepers are not simply portrayed as socio-economic losers. There is clear moral judgement, too. They are pigeonholed at the bottom of a moral hierarchy, influenced by Neoplatonist ideas about ontological development and ambition. The virtuous move onwards in life; the morally decrepit stay behind. Although Christians and Jews could also enjoy a more lofty status in Islamicate societies, the fact that many of them were ‘stuck’ at the bottom of the career ladder would not have met with surprise. It could be seen as a form of moral justice, meted out for adhering to the wrong creed.

Street-sweepers in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Ottoman miniature from the section "Precession of the Guilds" in the Surname-i Hümayun (1582) kept at Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Istanbul (Hazine 1344, folio 341a). Public domain.

A perceived moral inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims thus overlapped with the socio-economic inequality implicit in waste relations. The ever-present possibility of social unrest might have created a context in which such inadvertent self-anchoring was 'functional'.

Although the theological position on free will became fuzzy after the rejection of the Muʿtazila around 850, from a strictly legal perspective people were free to try to improve their position. Except for slaves, people were free to reject the fate that seemed handed down to them. There was social mobility. The kannāsūn, too, were free men, some were freedmen, but they were not slaves. And herein lay a disruptive potential. Sources indicate that refusing certain jobs was common and that policing them required considerable effort and money. Within this context, a religious minority identity could have anchored the kannāsūn to an old social script of dhimmī subservience to their Muslim superiors.

In summary, we have seen how the marginal position of Cairo's 'sweepers' was first of all produced by the 'waste relations' inherent to their work. We have, secondly, explored the idea that religious identity anchored kannāsūn to the traditionally and historically conceived inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, we have used the concept of anchoring in perhaps a somewhat unusual way. Whereas anchoring often describes how processes of change and innovation are managed, here we have considered the opposite: whether we can also use the concept of 'anchoring' to explain how the status quo is conditioned and maintained. In this scenario, we have not linked anchoring to a clearly discernible form of historical agency, whether operating top-down or bottom-up. In conclusion, this short experiment suggests that someone's identity and social stigma can serve as an anchor in and of itself.

Willem Flinterman (University of Amsterdam)

Is an Arabist and historian with a research focus on cultural and environmental history in the Middle East and Mediterranean world. His 2017 doctoral thesis was on ‘The cult of Qalāwūn: Waqf, commemoration, and dynasty in early Mamluk Cairo, ca. 1280-1340’.  In addition to this, Willem works as a consultant on ecological issues such as sustainable infrastructure and waste management, and received a grant from the Municipality of Rotterdam to run a pilot scheme to develop “nature-inclusive organic waste valorization” - that is to say, a small-scale mealworm farm in a community food garden in Rotterdam, where, through community-run mealworm rearing, he converted garden and kitchen waste into compost and feed. 

Additional Reading

Marco Armiero, Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).