Ottoman History Podcast - Ecology and Empire in Ottoman Egypt

Episode Date: September 16, 2012

with Alan Mikhail 70. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt Ottoman life was deeply embedded in the countryside and rural production, and thus, issues of irrigation and ecology surrounding the production of staple food crops ranked high on the list of imperial concerns. In this episode, Alan Mikhail explains the ecological history of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its breadbasket in Egypt, and explores other issues related to the nascent field of Middle East environmental history. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. And I'm Emre Safa Gurkan. Today our guest is Dr. Alan Mikhail, an assistant professor of history at Yale University. Dr. Mikhail, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So our topic today is the environmental history of the relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. It's a little bit of an awkward title, but I think it's going to make sense after we talk about sort of how these themes come together.

And I want to start off the discussion by asking you, Dr. Mikhail, how you got interested in this topic of environmental history, which for Ottoman historians, as an explicit field, is a relatively new thing. Okay, well, I didn't start off intending to write an environmental history of really anything. I was interested in the most general way in the Ottoman history of Egypt and how that related to the rest of the Ottoman Empire. So I started thinking about topics that might allow me to do this kind of relational history between Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and quickly came to realize that irrigation was one of the ways that I could do this, because irrigation is obviously a very local

process specific to regions throughout Egypt and different between different regions. But it's also a phenomenon, a process that has wide imperial implications because Egypt was the largest grain producer of the empire. If a large canal or a group of canals was not functioning for any reason, then that could greatly impact the quantity of food that Egypt produced, and that was shipped all over the empire. So it had both this very local, embedded-in-the-soil aspect to it, and it had this wide imperial aspect. So I wasn't sure when I began this project whether or not I would find lots of sources

on this topic. But thankfully for me, I did. And I think this reflects both the imperial and the local character of irrigation. I found sources both in the court records of Egypt from various rural locations, and then also imperial records from Istanbul, copies of Furman's and in the Muhemme about matters related to a large dam or the silting up of a canal or something like that. And one of the reasons that I wanted to do this kind of relational history in the first place is because of a certain discomfort I felt with the way that the historiography had been formed. way that the historiography had been formed. And that is, we tended to sort of do the history of Egypt on its own, cut off from the rest of the Ottoman Empire, from the imperial context of which it was so clearly a part. Or we tended to do sort of imperially focused histories of Egypt in which

it was a province and a set of provinces from which the palace, the army, the dynastic family extracted men, food, cash, these sorts of things. I wanted to find a way to bring these two historiographies together and to make them speak to each other in different kinds of ways, and to make them speak to each other in different kinds of ways, and then also to hopefully overcome some of the shortcomings that I found in both of those historiographies. And interestingly enough, environmental history for me seemed to be one of the ways to do that. So I want to ask you, clearly we can see how irrigation and the production of food can sort of tie the empire together in real ways,

and we see how this is expressed in your book. Maybe we'll talk about that a little. But first I want to ask, what makes this specifically environmental history? How is studying irrigation necessarily environmental history? Okay, that's a good question. So different historians, different environmental historians offer different definitions of what environmental history is.

And one of the most cited definitions of environmental history is one offered by John McNeill. And he says there are generally three modes in which environmental historians operate. We have a kind of environmental history that's interested in physical changes to the environment and the consequences of that for human communities and for ecologies.

We have a policy-based kind of environmental history that is interested in advocating for government regulations on emissions and things like that. And then we have a mode of environmentalization that's interested in the way different ideas have engaged nature. So whether that be poetry or painting and the way that nature is involved there. Another definition that's often cited of environmental history is that it's interested in the dialectical relationship between the human and the non-human or the human and the natural. All of these terms are problematic, obviously, and that the physical environment shapes the possibilities for certain human communities, what they can produce, where they can live, so on.

Human communities, in return, shape the environment by agriculture, irrigation, building infrastructure. That changed environment then creates a new set of limits, etc., etc., etc., etc. So irrigation allows us to get at that dialectical relationship i think right egypt is a desert with a river running through it um we can't get past that but given those constraints what did human communities do in that environment so they built this vast network of irrigation canals made it one of the the richest agricultural zones in the mediterranean and then that infrastructure that they built shaped where water flowed and those sorts of things, and back and forth. So that's why I think

irrigation is environmental history, right? And I should say, that's only one of the aspects that I tried to get at in my book. But, you know, since Herodotus, people have known, right, obviously, that the Nile is integral to any kind of story about Egypt. So that's where I also began. Also, one of the things that interested me in your book was how you mentioned that the Ottomans actually have a mindset that did not, as we, the classical Ottomans presumed, leave a province like Egypt are. So they were concerned as much in this agricultural policies, agricultural production of Egypt, just for the basic reason that they have to provide this grain to their subjects, especially in the imperial capital. So I think it's a great way of showing how the Ottoman mindset was larger than what the original presumed. That's right.

So irrigation is one piece of that. And I tried to sort of lay out in the book what I call an early modern system of natural resource management and irrigation is a piece of that. But you're absolutely right. So another piece of that is Egypt is an overwhelming producer of grain, but doesn't have a lot of native wood supplies. So from an imperial perspective in the capital, this is a problem that can be overcome by balancing natural

resources from areas of excess to areas of want. So in my case, it was grain moving out of Egypt and wood moving in. And most of the wood that came to Egypt came from parts of Anatolia, southwestern Anatolia, and then also parts of the Levant, right? What is Lebanon and parts of Syria today. And again, from an imperial perspective, not a local one in Egypt, this system works relatively well. There are lots of logistical hurdles to overcome. Moving logs across the Mediterranean is no small matter. And one of the arguments that I put forth in the book about this point is that it's really only an imperial system that can accomplish this. So there is this imperial, there is economic maximization as well in this kind of relation between the center and the frontier. And this plays into this new idea of an optimal pragmatism

in two ways. One is that the Ottomans were actually adjusting the needs and, you know, the demand and the supply between provinces and the capital, also between two different provinces, but also in dealing with peasants, in leaving, not micromanaging like it happened, again, something that I know from your book, as it happened in the 19th century, but relying on local know-how without interfering, but leaving the locals to handle their business. This is out of respect of this Ottoman pragmatism that one could get from your book. The Ottoman pragmatism, for sure.

I mean, I would stress that it's not, from my perspective, it's not a political program that the Ottomans put in place because they feel as though it's good to give autonomy to local subjects. It's more that this is expedient, right, that this is the best way to handle a complicated situation. And yes, we see that in the court records where this kind of control over, again, control is also a problematic word, but this kind of management of very minute issues in the countryside is largely devolved to local populations. that somehow this is a zone where politics is removed or where power doesn't exist. Clearly it does. But do you have any instances where this changed? Because when we look at the center and the frontier relations,

most of the time there were times when the Ottomans tried to change their policies, become more intervening, and there are times they're less intervening. So can you, did you manage to find, you know, different time periods in which the Ottomans actually changed their policies towards the appropriation of resources from Egypt? Or was it just one thing that remained stagnant over the centuries? No, of course not. So, you know, the general arc of the story that I tell is moving towards interventionist, capacious management of the countryside, right? The rapacious state. And that's the general arc. But it ebbs and flows, right? No pun intended. And

there are different instances over the course of, say, the late 17th and the 18th century in which the Ottoman state is more interventionist and less. So we see this specifically in terms of large dam projects. So for example, in the region of Fayyum in Egypt, which is a very particular region because it's not in the Nile Valley and it's not in the Delta. But because of different geographical factors, there's a large dam behind which collects a great amount of water that feeds this region for much of the year. So in the case of this dam, when there were problems, the state is very, very clued into this and very ready to come in and deal with this situation. This is not a situation in which the locals seem to have a lot of control over this dam.

And so we have these cases of maybe, I don't know, every 20, 25 years, a major kind of public works campaign undertaken to fix this, Dan. So within the general arc of moving towards a more kind of interventionist state over the course of the 18th century, we do have these kind of spikes in which the state is quite ready to intervene. And in those cases, we have no sense of kind of local autonomy of any kind. That actually relates to another question, which is tied to local autonomy, which is the issue of how the waterworks are going to be managed. It's one thing to say that they're caring about the dams and constantly doing new public works, but it's another thing to talk about how exactly that's carried out, you know, the specifics of the ecology.

So could you talk a little bit about the role of peasants' knowledge in the ecology of Ottoman irrigation in Egypt? A very common thing one sees in these court cases having to do with irrigation and irrigation works are disputes amongst whole villages and amongst villagers within one village about the allotment of water to a certain place. We have cases in which an upstream and a downstream village will come to the court, and usually it's the downstream village saying the upstream village is taking more water than they're supposed to take. We'll get back to supposed to in a second. And therefore, we, the downstream villagers, are not able to get the water that we're accustomed

to receiving. And therefore, we're not able to irrigate our fields properly. We're not able to grow the quantity of crops that we're supposed to. Hence, you, the Ottoman state, are not going to be able to tax us at the level you're used to taxing us. So what are we going to do? Usually, what comes out of this is this idea of precedent. I don't want to say custom, but of precedent. So the phrase that's used over and over again in both the Ottoman and the Arabic documents is من قديم الزمن. So from time immemorial or from old times. And so it's clear that there is an understanding that has been worked out over decades, centuries, of how much water certain

villages are supposed to get. And everybody knows this. So whenever this is broken, it's very clear. And the work of the court is in maintaining that system of precedent, in maintaining how much water goes to which village, which is interesting. So scholars, Ottomanists and others who have used court records from different places talk about this, right? The role of different kinds of law in these courts. And these are, we should say, right, these are Sharia courts where ostensibly Sharia law is supposed to be in effect. But, you know, when you come to read these records, you come to see that all sorts of arrangements are reached that have nothing to do with Sharia. And often you will see arrangements that have been reached outside of the court

that come to the court for the sole purpose of just being recorded in the records of the court. So when I talk about sort of local autonomy over water management, over the management of natural resources, that's the sort of thing that I'm talking about. And rural cultivators in Egypt are very clued into this, and they know the power of managing these natural resources and of how they can use this to impact the working of the imperial bureaucracy in the countryside. So there's an example I give in the book, which is of a particular village

in which there is an emir who comes, so let's say a local notable, if you like, who comes and wants to extract a certain amount of money from the villagers in this area. And it seems to be an exorbitant amount and way past anything that's reasonable. So these villagers basically vote with their feet and say we're going to abandon this village and therefore don't keep up the canals, don't cultivate the crops that they're supposed to. And this is a very common phenomenon

this abandonment of villages throughout throughout the empire not just in egypt and they in the end affect um the the removal of this emir from any position of power that affects them and they come back to the village it's like what barker says that they don't have to negotiate through the certain means of communication with the first provincial center if not then the imperial center so we may presume okay this was an early modern empire an agricultural based early modern empire that doesn't you know pay too much attention to the subject from what you say i gather this is not always this has not always been the case you present a different picture whereby a subject or like a collective you know, like a village, can actually negotiate their position.

Sure. But yes, it's a negotiation that is conflicted, right? It's a settlement more than a negotiation in some ways, right? That they're able to use their power as rural cultivators to affect a desired outcome. So who settles? The center settles, you mean? Who has the leverage in these negotiations? I mean, I would say that the rural cultivators

have the leverage. That's what I gathered from you. Yeah, in this particular instance, right? To generalize out from there, yeah, we have other examples of that that Karen Barkey and others have examined. But I mean, I think we need to sort of be attentive to

write the specifics of each of these situations because when you look at all this adaletname literature in the middle east it's a Persian genre right we talk about really centralized governments and there's this body of literature that says you have to be just

there's a circle of justice you have to and the entire the entire genre rests upon one this economic condition for if you if you're not just then you will lose money and then things will go out of you know first you will suffer economically which in the end will have some political repercussions so i think it's very well within this picture as well, where you have to provide justice, you have to settle, you have to take into account your own subjects, or otherwise you first have to suffer economic, then political consequences. Yeah, the circle of justice is very clear, actually, about the role of rural cultivators in the maintenance of the entire political system of the empire, which I think is a sort of remarkable statement.

I think here it's good if you could talk a little bit about why exactly these Egyptian peasants were so important within the context of some of the periodic famines that would take place in the empire. Why are the Ottomans so concerned to get reliable grain from Egypt? Well, as you say, I mean, there are famines that are occurring, you know, throughout the empire periodically. Provisioning is obviously a topic that Ottoman historians have paid quite a good deal of attention to. So the grain that leaves Egypt goes to not just Istanbul, a lot of it goes to Istanbul, a lot of it also goes to the Hejaz. So the Egypt-Hijaz connection is a very important one. I don't want to say throughout time, but long before the Ottomans.

For the Mamluks as well, provisioning the Hejaz is really the business of Egypt. And the Ottomans cultivate that and maintain that. So we see that. But beyond those two sort of largest areas of provisioning from Egypt, all over the empire, Crete, both Tripolis, Izmir, parts of the Levant. So Egypt is really important for sending grain all over the place in times of want and not in times of want. and not in times of want. And also we have a system throughout Egypt of grain storage facilities in which grain is stored,

particularly for these times of famine, so that it can be sent to various parts, again, of the empire. And obviously in most of the major cities of the empire, we have these storage facilities. So how does this system work? Something that I couldn't understand. Is it first shipped to Istanbul, then re-shipped to other provinces? Or is there a connection between the Egyptian Alexandria and Similna, for instance? Yes.

Bypassing Istanbul, that this is a huge topic that we know um very little about actually is and you know this better than i do i think um it is how this this system of shipping actually worked and who were the ship captains right and who were the um um the people who brought the food to the ports, right? Anyway, that's a huge topic. But the things that I saw were, yes, orders to directly send food, so to bypass Istanbul.

So send food from various Egyptian ports, not just Alexandria, but Rashid and Domiat, to send them to, again, various places in North Africa, the Levant, various Mediterranean locations as well, the Hejaz, and obviously Istanbul. And the importance of this is the following, and this is the historiographical point I wanted to make, is that we tend to think of the links in the empire as emanating out from Istanbul, right? So the metaphor is the hub and spoke model. And I wanted to show that there are many, many connections throughout the empire that don't fit in this model at all. And tracing the

food web, if you like, I call it the food chain in the book helps us to get at some of that right so we have these independent links independent is maybe too strong of a word but we have these these links that that in some ways bypass istanbul that istanbul obviously knows about manages in some sort of offhanded way, but nevertheless that function outside of the direct administrative purview of Istanbul. But actually how those links work out, who are these people, the communication between these locations, if there's any, that's a huge topic that I think will be worked on in the coming years. I think you're absolutely right about that.

We actually dealt with the same issue for very briefly in a podcast about drug smuggling in the Ottoman and the late Ottoman period. And Crete is a big stopping point for a lot of shipping that goes across the Mediterranean. And so, and all of this is controlled by local families and the like. So this is a emerging topic that people are just starting to get their hands on. And it comes up as well in issues such as forestry, how lumber is transferred from one part of the empire to another. So you've made an excellent argument for how the center and periphery in the Ottoman Empire are linked by ecology. And in a previous podcast we've done,

we've talked about this issue of ecology in the emerging field of environmental history and even discussed your book a little. So what I want to ask you is in some of your new projects going forward, and particularly this new edited volume that's coming out, what are you trying to accomplish? And what is the mission statement of this volume? This is a book about Middle East environmental history in a very general sort of way. And the idea was to bring together a group of people who have worked on various topics related to Middle East environmental history, obviously not everyone who is doing work in this field, to mark the field and to show the utility of Middle East environmental history, both for non-Middle East environmental historians and for those in Middle East studies,

Middle East historians, some anthropologists, geographers, etc. So the book basically covers 1500 to the present, various parts of the Middle East and North Africa and various various topics. And so sort of the argument that we're putting forth in the book is that we can't understand global environmental history. We can't understand things like climate change, the history of climate change, the history of certain commodities without understanding the Middle East component of their histories. And at the same time, we can't understand certain phenomenon within Middle Eastern history that historians have been interested in for quite a long time without understanding some of the environmental aspects of these topics. understanding some of the environmental aspects of these topics.

So we try to lay this out in the book. So for example, medieval historians talk about the medieval warm period in which temperatures rose a few degrees in both Europe and China. And the evidence for this seems to be clear. So it's been taken to be a global phenomenon. People like Richard Bullitt and others have found that actually when you look at certain parts of the Middle East, in Professor Bullitt's case, it's Iran and parts of Central Asia, you actually see that there was a cooling period in the same centuries as people identify as the medieval warm period. So he calls it, right, the big chill

that happened in Iran between, say, the end of the 9th century and the 12th century. So this is an example of a way in which the Middle East aspect of a story about climate change changes the way that we think about this history of climate in the medieval period and there are numerous other examples um that we give beyond that you know we have uh lots of work to do to understand how various cultural traditions many of which um intersect with the Middle East understand the natural world, right?

So there's a lot of work that's done on Jewish environmental ethics or Hinduism and the environment, right? And there is some work that has been done on Islamic environmentalism or Islamic environmental ethics or those sorts of things. But there's a vast amount of work left to do.

And again, to understand kind of a global history of environmentalism or something like that, this is obviously an important component of that. On the flip side, on sort of what environmental history can do for Middle East historians, I think there are many things, but I'll just mention a couple of them. One is Ottoman historians, Safavid historians, Middle East historians interested in the 19th and the 20th centuries. We are very much within, and we sort of talked about this a little bit when we were talking about center-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire. We largely accept many of the geographical boundaries that have come to us for one reason or another. And environmental history, I think, offers us a way to get past that.

And people have begun to get past that, as you mentioned, in many different kinds of ways, whether it be drug smuggling or merchant families or something like that. Environmental history offers us another way of getting past that by understanding how certain ecologies do not pay attention to geographical boundaries in any sorts of ways, how certain commodities move, those sorts of things. Also, environmental history, maybe it goes without saying, gets us, I think, to where the vast majority of people in the Middle East have lived for at least a millennium, longer than that, obviously.

And that is in the countryside. They were rural cultivators, the vast, vast majority of people who lived in the region that we call the Middle East. And environmental history, again, is not the only way, And environmental history, again, is not the only way and not it's not the exclusive way to get at this, but helps us to understand some of this some of this history. Right. So Middle East historians have tended to focus a great deal on cities for obvious reasons. And this is really important work. But environmental history helps us to get at some of these rural histories. But environmental history helps us to get at some of these rural histories. And yes, in ways that help us to connect rural histories to urban ones, but also in ways that have nothing to do with cities, which is, I think, in and of itself, important work that needs to be done. Up until now, we talked about irrigation, agricultural and human agency states.

But human beings are not the only ones who actually lived on the soil. And there's this growing literature, this nascent historiography that talks about animals in the Ottoman Empire. So can we just cover that a little bit? To what extent can we talk about a separate environmentalist field regarding animals in the Ottoman Empire? You're right.

There is a growing literature on this topic. So Suraya Faruqi has edited a volume specifically on animals and people in the Ottoman Empire. That's the title of the book, I believe. Sam White also has done some work on animals and epizootics in the Ottoman Empire. And you're right. Animals do live in the countryside and are really important to the countryside. So in thinking about this topic, one of the things that I want to do is to write a kind of history of human-animal relations in the countryside. And

I really want to focus on kind of the economic aspects of this relationship. What do animals do in the countryside? What do they make possible in the countryside? So if you think about the early modern Ottoman Empire, a rural agrarian world, it doesn't take long to sort of come to realize that animals are really important to this world. From plowing, to turning water wheels, to bringing goods to market, to transport, to status, to capital accumulation, all sorts of things. And when you start to read, for instance, court records, you come to see that animals are all over the place.

So in the case of Egypt, some of the most important forms of property are animals. Land ownership is not a huge percentage of the capital that is in the countryside. So animals are a way to preserve wealth or save wealth. That's right. So when you read estate inventories, for example, you see very, very commonly that animals often form the largest percentage of people's estates.

And therefore, we have all sorts of complicated commercial transactions having to do with animals is it because they produce economic value only but some of them let's say a nice horse are symbols of power and luxury right so um horses specifically are status animals um most of the rural people that I'm talking about did not have horses, right? Horses are usually notables, military classes of society. But most of the animals that I'm talking about are kind of large domesticated work animals, right? So oxen, water buffaloes, donkeys, some camels, cows, sheep sometimes, these sorts of things.

And it's specifically the work that they do or the products that they provide, milk, wool, et cetera, that is where the value is derived from. I think the economic importance is attested by the agricultural vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire. The basic plot of land is a chift. Of course.

The person who does it is a chift, and a chift means enough land, chift, two oxen could plow. So that shows us actually the entire system, agricultural system is based on the, you know, before the mechanical force, based on this animal labor. Our system is based on the, you know, before the mechanical force, based on this animal labor. Without it, you know, we have so much land. What we don't have is the labor. I think the animals fit into this category. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So I want to try to understand the specific economic importance of animals to the real world. Again, in Egypt in the 18th century um i think it's it's a really important topic that people have not um gotten at um and i think this has to do with and this isn't specific only to middle east historians right but um and this is a sort of larger point about environmental history, is that we tend to privilege, obviously, humans as the only agents in history. But I think this discussion about animals helps us to see also some of the, I don't want to use the word agency for animals, many people do, and that's a discussion one could have.

But the historical importance of animals to this rural world. But I think about this subject in the following way, that, you know, if we wanted to understand the history of the 20th century American city, we have to pay attention to the role of the automobile in shaping the city, in the location of housing, the way people move, in the way people eat, all of these things. So I think understanding the role of animals in a rural society like the Ottoman Empire is a similar sort of thing. We miss a huge part of the story without understanding the role of animals in this society. And so that's some of what I want to do.

What about their destructive role? For instance, I listened to a presentation about the grasshoppers and how they were handled with something called the check it gets to your grasshopper so there's again this local knowledge you mentioned in your book so they they know how to deal with it but also there they can be as well you know they can there's something that shows how men handle the environment how they fought against the destructive effect of animals, some hinting at this animal agency that you were reluctant to pronounce. I just pronounced it for you.

Okay, thank you. Sure, yeah. The locusts, there are various locust plagues in Ottoman history that people have written about. So the topic of animal history or um you know the history of human animal relations is a huge one that can go on in in many many many different directions um and i'm i don't have any notion that i'm going to do it all i i want to do a very specific um study of the economic role of um domesticated animals in the royal setting. Outside of Middle Eastern history, animal historians have done,

have tended largely to focus on some of the cultural, philosophical, political implications of animals. So the definitions of the human, for example. Where are the borders between human and animal? The way that animals are used as symbols in literature, those sorts of things. And those are all really important questions. But I'm not going to be dealing with them, I think, in my work. Well, I think you're onto something there. Of course, when we talk about the animals you mentioned in Egypt, the work animals, it might be different in different settings in the empire that different animals are important in regions where there's a lot of pastoralism.

Camels, sheep, and goats would also play a role, but I think the same thing would apply. Actually, I've referred in a previous paper to animals as the ungulate proletariat of pastoralist society because they bear the brunt of a lot of the environmental problems and a lot of the war. The animals are used for provisioning even as much as the human being. So I think that in an empire where there's probably more domesticated animals than humans, this is a really big topic in the end. Absolutely. Well, Dr. Mikhail, thanks for coming on the podcast. We've learned a lot today. Thanks for having me. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in.

And for more information, you can check out the website where we have a select bibliography. You can also leave your comments and questions. That's all for this installment of the Adam History Podcast. Until next time, take care. موسيقى النهر الجاري سنين من كان بيصدق مين النهر الجاري سنين يتحسب بالملايين نحوين له طريق يمين وشمال دايم عايزين نحوين والطريق يمين وشمال دايم عايزين ونعدل

فيك تعديل السلام السلام على ذا تحوين تحوين على مدرحين لا سلام على ذا تحولنا مدرحين يا سلام على ذا تحول هيكون تحولنا حياتنا مش بس القارئين

يا سلام يا سلام يا سلام على ذا تحول احنا إرادة وعمال وعزيمة تمحي بان والإم غيرهم أعمال إحنا إرادة وعمال وعزيمة في كل مجال والسد معدش غايان وابن ابني في كل مجال والسد معدش غايان ده حقيقة ومال غمسين يا سلام يا سلام على دا تحويل حويلنا مدرنين يا سلام على دا تحويل حيكون تحويل يا حياتنا مستسل نار الدين

يا سلام يا سلام يا سلام على ذات حضير أنا شايفة وكل سرور مستقبلي في الظهور أنا شايفة وكل سرور مستقبلي في الظهور والصانع في فتنور أنا شايفة وكل سرور مستقبل بي في الظلوم مصانع في فتنور أنا شايفة وكل سرور

مستقبل به في الظهور ما صانع فيه في الظهور وخضار على الأرض البور ونعيم للناس موفور وخضار على الأرض البور ونعيم للناس موفور والطريق للعز جميل السلام على ذا تحويل حولنا مدعى النيل

السلام على ذا تحويل حيكون تحويل حياتنا مستسل طهر الدين يا سلام يا سلام يا سلام على ذات عمر تمت مرحلة عقبات من حق كل مخال تمت مرحلة عقبان منحى كل مخان ونقدم للأجيال أروى وتممسان لإرادة الخور جمال

وإرادة الشعب عظيم أسلام أسلام على ذا تحوي حولنا مكرمين أسلام على ذا تحوي حيكون تحوينا حياتنا مش بس الضارين موسيقى تحويلنا حرامنا مش بس النهر النيل يا سلام يا سلام يا سلام على ما تحويل © BF-WATCH TV 2021