LAUSR

It is hard to know if Abd al-Hai was a reliable narrator. His stories seem too good to be true, with daring escapes, clever improvizations, and ingenious subterfuges. Abd al-Hai was a smuggler: an inveterate and indeed consummate smuggler. He ran guns through British blockades during the First World War, he smuggled hashish into Egypt, and he was even suspected of trafficking slaves from the Horn of Africa. Yet still more remarkably he had a flare for dramatic prose. He relished the notoriety he had attained over the years and was not immune to the temptation to self-aggrandizement. This was a man who did not hesitate to kiss and tell, and so Abd al-Hai provides a rare glimpse into the secretive world of smugglers. He certainly may have embellished details in the pursuit of a better story, but as first-hand accounts of smuggling, Abd al-Hai’s self-aggrandizing stories are important in and of themselves. Smugglers are also acute observers of states and legal systems. To a certain extent smuggling is the consequence of state policy: laws and regulations are imposed and smugglers then contravene them. Consequently, smugglers profit from intimate knowledge of how states actually work. There is almost inevitably a gap between the intentions of policy-makers and the ways that these policies are implemented in the world. Smugglers sought to find and exploit this gap between the intentions of bureaucrats and their impact upon the populations they governed. The most successful smugglers were not determined criminals so much as inventive lawyers who understood where to push and prod the soft underbelly of the leviathan. Thus Abd al-Hai’s stories also provide us with unique insights into the nature of the state, because smuggling was ultimately an effort to understand the state better than it understood itself. It is, of course, problematic to refer to the state as if it were a coherent agent. State bureaucracies are inevitably diverse and constituted by competing interests, ideologies and personalities. Moreover, it is well established that the boundary between state and society is blurred, malleable and ephemeral; if not altogether fictional. Abd al-Hai, like all smugglers, intuitively understood this subtle idea long before political scientists were