A History of the Middle East (19 page)

The nationalist renaissance in Egypt, on which Khedive Abbas had vainly hoped to capitalize, gathered strength in Cromer’s last years, before his retirement in 1907. It found its leader in a slender and passionate youth named Mustafa Kamel, who, like several other nationalists, had studied law in Cairo and in France, where he had received encouragement for his views. Cromer was inclined to dismiss the nationalists as insignificant, and it was true that they had all the characteristics of salon intellectuals – powerfully eloquent but
weak in practical proposals to meet the needs of ordinary Egyptians, from whose feelings they were divorced. These weaknesses were partly due to their style of education but also arose because the Veiled Protectorate denied them any prospect of taking a part in government.

The nationalists were also confused in their aims. Kamel was attracted to the pan-Islamic movement as the best weapon against the British occupation, and he received some secret encouragement and funds for his National Party from the sultan. But the illogicality of combining pan-Islamicism with Egyptian territorial nationalism was exposed in 1906 when Abdul Hamid, who was building a railway across Arabia to Medina, landed a force at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and laid claim to the whole of the Sinai peninsula. Kamel and his party launched a vigorous campaign in his support. It was left to Cromer to insist that Sinai belonged to Egypt. His concern was to protect the Suez Canal from the Turks, but it was he rather than the nationalists who championed the cause of Egyptian territorial integrity.

Cromer allowed a free press to flourish in Egypt. He had a liberal streak, but principally he did not think that fiery nationalist editorials (Kamel founded his own paper in 1900) were a threat to his order. The ironic consequence was that there was greater freedom of the spoken and written word in Egypt than in the Arab Ottoman provinces. Two leading newspapers were founded in Cairo by Arab Christians from Syria.

The press was by no means exclusively anti-British, nor were all politically active supporters of Mustafa Kamel nationalists – some were more collaborators, who were doing well out of the British occupation and saw no advantage in bringing it to an end. But there were moderates to whom Cromer gave headmasterly approval as ‘the Girondists of the Egyptian national movement’. These included Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, who died in 1905, and his spiritual disciples in the Umma or People’s Party. They doubted Kamel’s political judgement, especially during the Aqaba incident. Another moderate was Saad Zaghloul, a young lawyer. Cromer allowed him
to become head of the newly created education department and, when Cromer left Egypt, warmly commended him as the ideal type of moderate nationalist. But Zaghloul was to become the representative of uncompromising nationalism and Britain’s implacable enemy.

In 1906, despite Kamel’s powerful charisma, his movement was losing ground. Then an event occurred which united the national feelings of all Egyptians. Although hardly momentous in itself, it was a turning-point in the British occupation and its effects may be compared with the effect on the Indian independence movement of the Amritsar massacre in 1919. At Denshawai, a small Delta village, a shooting-party of British officers was set upon and beaten by outraged
fellahin
who believed that the British were killing the pigeons which were the local staple diet. An officer who went for help died of concussion and heat-stroke. A
fellah
who tried to help him was found by a party of British soldiers who, assuming he had murdered the officer, beat him to death.

Cromer and his colleagues, backed by the British press, saw the incident as a symptom of the xenophobic fanaticism that was sweeping the countryside, fanned by the nationalists. Exemplary punishment was required. A special tribunal sentenced four to hang, seventeen more to prison or flogging. The sentences were carried out on the site, and the villagers were compelled to watch.

This was not an atypical act of colonial repression – the horrified reaction of educated Egyptians may be taken as a tribute to the general physical mildness of the British occupation. But the shock and outrage, even among those who had come to accept the British presence, gave a lasting impetus to the national movement. When Cromer retired in the following year, the silent Egyptian crowds watched him on his route to Cairo station from behind British troops with fixed bayonets.

Cromer’s reputation remained high in Britain and his own self-congratulatory account of his achievements was generally accepted, although some close observers felt that he had become increasingly out of touch, surrounding himself with nonentities like any autocrat.
In 1906 a reforming Liberal government had swept to power in Britain, however, and it was clearly time for a change.

The choice of successor fell on Eldon Gorst, a senior diplomat who had spent nearly twenty years in Egypt and, as financial adviser to the Egyptian government, had led the negotiations with France over the 1904 Entente Cordiale. Small, highly ambitious and academically brilliant, his outward sense of superiority concealed an inner lack of self-confidence. He lacked Cromer’s presence but, unlike Cromer, he spoke excellent Arabic. He was not much liked by other Anglo-Egyptian officials.

Gorst was thrilled with his appointment. He wrote, ‘Throughout the British Empire there is no place in which the occupant enjoys greater freedom of action than that of British Agent and consul-general in Egypt. The consul-general is
de facto
ruler of the country, without being hampered by a parliament or by a network of councils like the viceroy of India…’ But, having stepped into Cromer’s shoes, he felt that a change of direction was needed:

Gorst was trying not to end the British occupation but to make it more acceptable and, by so doing, to subdue the nationalist ferment. To the fury of his British colleagues he set about reducing their powers in favour of the Egyptian
mudirs
(district officers) and he tried to blow life into the moribund provincial councils to act as the
mudirs
’ advisers. But Gorst’s principal strategy was to restore the authority of the khedive, which had been emasculated by Cromer. His rapprochement with Abbas allowed the khedive to replace the ministers who had been subservient to Cromer with others more to his liking. But the khedive was no democrat: he
shared Gorst’s aim of reducing the influence of the nationalists who challenged his authority. As happens so often, however, the modest degree of liberalization merely fuelled the nationalist demands. Agitation increased, and the press heaped an avalanche of abuse on Egyptian ministers as well as the English occupiers. Gorst found himself restoring the repressive press law of 1881 which Cromer had never found it necessary to use because he despised the native press and regarded it as a useful outlet for young Egypt to let off steam. In the countryside there was an alarming new crime wave which partly reflected the rebellious spirit of the nation. Gorst introduced a Relegation Law allowing suspected brigands to be imprisoned without trial in a new penal colony in the Kharga Oasis.

In common with not a few of the academically brilliant, Gorst lacked political imagination. His next error, in 1910, was to attempt to extend the Suez Canal Company’s original ninety-nine-year concession, due to expire in 1968, by forty years in return for an annual share of the profits. He persuaded the shadowy general assembly to approve the Company’s offer, but even this gathering of elderly and conservative notables was unable to accept something which so outraged Egyptian public opinion. The Canal Company was already regarded as a foreign ‘state within a state’. Only one assembly member dared to vote in favour of acceptance. Gorst was obliged to let the matter drop.

Two days later Boutros Ghali, the Coptic grandee whom the khedive had chosen as prime minister, was assassinated by a young Egyptian nationalist. Ghali was unfairly regarded as a British stooge and, as minister of justice, he had presided over the Denshawai trial. When Gorst refused to reprieve him from execution, the assassin became a hero in the streets of Cairo.

Gorst’s policies appeared to be in ruins, and there was uproar in Britain. Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative opposition in the House of Commons, used the occasion to deliver a philosophical address on the general unsuitability of self-government for ‘orientals’. The former US president Theodore Roosevelt, who
passed through Egypt on his return from an African hunting-trip, told the British to ‘govern or get out’.

Although he did lack political flair, the well-intentioned Gorst was also unlucky and he faced the obstructive opposition of most of his British colleagues. His term of office began with a financial collapse and an acute recession. He might have recovered the situation if he had retained his energy and interest, but he was facing an agonizing death from cancer of the spine. In 1911 he had to go.

In some respects Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman, was the obvious successor. Deprived by the Liberal government of his ambition to become viceroy of India, where he had been commander-in-chief, he was glad to accept what he regarded as the almost equally important post of British agent in Egypt. He was soon entertaining visions of the annexation of Egypt to Britain, with himself as the first viceroy of Egypt and Sudan. He shared the dream of Cecil Rhodes – an Africa coloured red on the map from Cairo to Cape.

The British government warned that, while order must be restored, there must be no simple replacement of civilian rule by the military. Kitchener’s style was much closer to that of Cromer than that of Gorst. He once again emasculated the role of the khedive, his old opponent. He restored the power of the British advisers and increased their numbers. His personal ascendancy – semi-regal in style – was even greater than that of Cromer, who expressed alarm from his retirement. The protectorate’s veil had virtually been removed.

With a series of repressive measures, Kitchener succeeded in scattering the nationalists (whose morale had not recovered from Mustafa Kamel’s premature death in 1908), but he did not rely merely on coercion. Like Cromer, he showed sympathy with the
fellahin
, but he took more practical steps to try to help them, attempting to familiarize himself with their problems in a series of quasi-royal visits to the countryside. He ordered the belated establishment of Egypt’s first Ministry of Agriculture. He tried to tackle the problem of acute overflooding in the Delta by means of drainage, and that
of
fellahin
indebtedness with a new law which made it impossible to recover in the courts any money lent to a
fellah
who owned less than five
feddans
(a
feddan
being about one acre), that is 90 per cent of all
fellahin
The economics of this measure were doubtful, as it undermined the new Agricultural Bank which had been founded to relieve the
fellahin
from the grip of the usurers. But it at least temporarily raised the morale of the
fellahin
, who showed reasonable content with Kitchener’s policies.

Having pacified the countryside – the Egypt which mattered in the view of both Kitchener and Cromer – he felt he could ignore the despised urban intelligentsia. In 1913 he even felt confident enough to allow some constitutional changes, to satisfy both the Liberal government at home and the moderate nationalists in Egypt. A new partially elected legislative assembly was given some powers over taxation and the right to interrogate ministers. This was a cynical exercise, because Kitchener had no more belief than Cromer or Balfour in the value of representative institutions for orientals, but he felt it would be a useful palliative and that those he dubbed the ‘noisy extremists’ would be excluded. But he was wrong. Saad Zaghloul, now emerging as a truly intransigent nationalist, was elected first vice-president of the new assembly. Zaghloul showed himself a skilled parliamentarian and under his leadership the assembly so criticized and discredited government ministers that they were delighted when the parliamentary session ended. The start of the First World War before the next session was due to begin brought the tentative exercise in constitutional government to an end.

Kitchener claimed credit for restoring order to Egypt, but later experience shows that he was fortunate and his luck would not have lasted. If it had not been for the war, which gave Britain the excuse to clamp down on political activity, the new nationalist ferment could not easily have been contained.

When the First World War brought Britain, France and Russia into conflict with Germany and Austro-Hungary, Britain hoped that Turkey would remain neutral and that Egypt could be kept out of the war. Britain’s sole strategic concern was the security of the Suez Canal.
When Turkey decided to join the Central Powers – Germany and Austro-Hungary – in November 1914, Egypt’s status became a problem, for it was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. There were strong voices in the cabinet (in which Kitchener became minister of war) in favour of annexing Egypt and abolishing the Muhammad Ali dynasty. But the remaining British officials in Egypt demurred at the prospect of direct rule and, at a time when Germany was being accused of tearing up international treaties, the Foreign Office was opposed to breaking the countless undertakings not to annex Egypt.

The typical British compromise was to declare a protectorate, in December 1914, and simply to remove the figment of Ottoman suzerainty. The pro-Ottoman Khedive Abbas was conveniently on a European tour and was informed that he had abdicated. A replacement was found in his elderly and amiable uncle Hussein Kamel. There were still problems: Hussein Kamel could hardly be given the same title as his new suzerain King George V of England, so a compromise was reached on ‘Sultan’, to be addressed as ‘Hautesse’ instead of ‘Majesté’. The new sultan died in 1917 and was replaced by his younger brother, Prince Ahmed Fuad. Fuad was not satisfactory, however – although no Anglophobe, he had been educated in Italy, where he lived with his exiled father Khedive Ismail, he spoke little Arabic and he made no attempt to hide his lack of sympathy for Egypt and its problems.