A History of the Middle East (32 page)

King Fuad had not given up hope of reducing the Wafd’s domination of Egypt’s political life. When he refused to give his assent to two bills presented to parliament by the Wafd, Nahas resigned in the belief that the king would be unable to resist the Wafd’s popular strength. The king turned to Sidky Pasha, an autocratic millionaire who had held office with ability in various governments but always followed his own path. Sidky was not a king’s man, but he was quite prepared to inaugurate a quasi-dictatorship under royal auspices. With the help of British troops he suppressed public demonstrations and went on to amend the 1923 constitution and the electoral law to increase the king’s powers and ensure the defeat of the Wafd in the 1931 elections.

Sidky’s position was immeasurably strengthened by the fact that he was clearly no puppet of Britain, the palace or anyone else. He muzzled the press and deflated the Wafd by preventing it from using its most powerful weapon – control of the streets. At the same time he used the political moratorium to exhibit his talent for finance. Sidky had been one of the original promoters of Egyptian capitalist enterprise during the First World War; his abilities were suited
to dealing with the consequences of the world depression and shielding Egypt from them as far as possible. His regime marked the beginning of the move away from free-trade liberalism, installed under Cromer, towards the egyptianization of the economy.

In opposition, the Wafd was more than ever the popular party. When in 1933 Sidky was forced to abandon the premiership after a stroke and was succeeded by lesser men, the Wafd was able to rouse the country with demands for the restoration of the 1923 constitution which would inevitably restore the party to power.

Britain faced a dilemma. The popular mood in Egypt was becoming dangerous. In November 1935 there was a huge pro-Wafd demonstration by students in Cairo. (The grave 17-year-old leader of the secondary students, named Gamal Abdul Nasser, was grazed on the forehead by a police bullet.) But Britain was still reluctant to see the return of a Wafdist government.

However, a solution was at hand. Although the Wafd had lost none of its appetite for power, it was now more prepared to compromise to achieve it. The Wafd had learned that it could never hold power for long against British opposition. At the same time, it shared Britain’s growing alarm at Italian imperial ambitions in Africa, manifested by Italy’s invasion and seizure of Ethiopia. Egypt was dependent on Britain for its defences.

As the Wafd abandoned its demand for an immediate and total British evacuation, its relations with the British high commission improved. Nahas became on good terms with the formidable Sir Miles Lampson, who, with more than a trace of the qualities of Cromer, had been appointed high commissioner in 1933 and was to remain in Egypt for thirteen years.

Even King Fuad, although still detesting the Wafd, was prepared to envisage its return, as this would give him some much needed popularity. In December 1935 he agreed to the restoration of the 1923 constitution. Four months later he died and was succeeded by his handsome and affable 16-year-old son Farouk, who returned from a brief and inadequate period of schooling in England.

The first important event of the new reign was the signing, on
26 August 1936, of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of alliance, at which no fewer than six unsuccessful attempts had been made over the previous fourteen years. If the 1922 declaration had given Egypt semi-independence, the 1936 treaty went some of the rest of the way. Sir Miles Lampson became ambassador instead of high commissioner, and Britain sponsored Egypt’s entry into the League of Nations. Britain undertook to bring the Capitulations to a speedy end and at the Montreux Conference in 1937 Egypt obtained full rights of jurisdiction and taxation over all residents from the Capitulatory powers.

The treaty was for a period of twenty years and both parties were committed to a further alliance in 1956, although Egypt would then have the right to submit to third-party judgement the question of whether British troops were any longer necessary in Egypt. The British occupation was formally ended, but British troops would only gradually be withdrawn to the Canal zone and Sinai, as Egypt’s defence capability improved. Egypt gained control over its security forces for the first time since 1882. The British inspector-general of the Egyptian army was replaced by an Egyptian, and military intelligence was egyptianized. The numbers of Europeans in the police force were scaled down, although Russell Pasha remained at the head of the Cairo police force until his retirement ten years later. Egypt had to abandon most of its ambitions to recover control over the Sudan, though it is true that the terms of the Allenby 1924 ultimatum were reversed. Egyptian immigration into the Sudan was no longer restricted, and Egyptian as well as Sudanese troops were to be placed at the disposal of the governor-general. Egyptian officials were to be employed where no Sudanese were available. However, this did not mean that the pre-1924 situation in Sudan had been restored, because by this time a Sudanese national movement had developed and more Sudanese had become qualified. The Anglo-Egyptian condominium in Sudan was a fiction as Britain remained unequivocally the dominant partner.

As events turned out, all the treaty’s concessions to Egyptian nationalist demands were largely nullified by the clause which gave
Britain the right to re-occupy the country with the unrestricted use of Egyptian ports, airports and roads in the event of Britain’s involvement in war. Only three years passed before this clause was invoked. However, in 1936 the immediate reaction of the Egyptian crowds was favourable. The young king was wildly cheered in the streets – even Sir Miles Lampson was applauded. There were hopes of a new era, as the king gave the impression that he would take a special interest in the plight of the impoverished
fellahin
. Under his guidance the Wafd would institute some true reforms.

The reality was rather different. Farouk did not lack either intelligence or good intentions, but he had been badly trained for his task. Also, he shared his father’s detestation of the Wafd and his taste for political intrigue.

The Wafd remained the party of the masses and the true expression of political Egypt. However, before the treaty, its ‘anti-Britishness’ was the only real plank in its political platform. Its ranks contained a whole spectrum of views, from arch-conservative to extremely radical, but its centre of gravity was well to the right. The vast majority of those who voted for it lived in the rural areas which were dominated by the large and medium-size landowners. Very few Wafdist members of parliament wanted any serious changes in Egypt’s social or economic system; above all they did not want any reform in the fantastically unequal holdings of land, which meant that 6 per cent of the proprietors owned 63 per cent of the cultivated area. On the other hand, Egypt’s small but growing industrial sector was the creation of a few wealthy Egyptians outside the Wafd, such as Sidky Pasha and Talaat Harb, who co-operated with a number of European industrialists and financiers in establishing an Egyptian Federation of Industries in 1924.

In one field – education – the Wafd could claim to have instigated reform to repair the neglect of the Cromer era. One of the first acts of the Zaghloul government in 1923 had been to declare education free and compulsory. The education budget was steadily increased in the 1920s and 1930s, and the number of pupils of both sexes rose rapidly. The expansion was most remarkable in secondary and university education. But there were serious defects. Since few new
schools were built, the classes became overcrowded and standards declined. Also, no attempt was made to adapt the system to Egypt’s needs and, as later became characteristic of many newly independent countries, a growing body of graduates from the state secondary schools and universities was unable to find employment. The problem was compounded by the existence of an entirely separate network of foreign secular and religious schools alongside the Egyptian state system. These had high prestige but they greatly accentuated class divisions, as the sons and daughters of the Egyptian upper class who were sent to them grew up speaking French and feeling little in common with the mass of their fellow-countrymen.

The students began to show increasing impatience and discontent with the Wafd and with Egypt’s handicapped form of parliamentary democracy in general. Many of them regarded the Anglo-Egyptian treaty as a betrayal, and some of them looked to a new leader – an eloquent and charismatic former schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna, who founded his Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia in 1928.

In his early years al-Banna appealed most to the poor and illiterate, but in 1934 he moved his headquarters to Cairo and began to attract supporters from the better educated – students, teachers, civil servants and army officers. Branches of the Brotherhood sprang up throughout the country. Al-Banna’s appeal was simple and idealistic. He called for an Islamic state based on the Holy Koran, the traditions of Islam providing everything that was needed for the new social order. But if the Brotherhood lacked a political programme, it had organization through its network of branches. Its youth groups began to receive paramilitary training.

The Brotherhood had rivals in its appeal to Egyptian youth. There was the Young Egypt (Misr al-Fitat) party of Ahmad Hussein, which was nominally socialist but which, with its uniform of green shirts modelled on Mussolini’s Black Shirts, had a strongly fascist character. In response the Wafd organized a rival group of Blue Shirts, who fought a series of pitched battles with the Green Shirts in the universities. It was not long before a fascist-type royalist youth
movement was formed and joined the fray. Egyptian political life was speedily deteriorating.

Although the Anglo-Egyptian treaty was unpopular with those who wanted to end all traces of the British occupation, it had one side-effect which helped their cause. The Egyptian army was now theoretically an ally of the British, so Britain was anxious to improve it; at the same time the Wafd needed to gain popularity. For the first time the Military Academy was opened to young men from classes other than the landowning aristocracy. Gamal Abdul Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat and a score of other ambitious young Egyptians were able to take up a military career and so play their part in the Free Officers movement which seventeen years later launched the 1952 revolution which brought both the monarchy and the British occupation to an end.

The Wafd was, however, in a slow but inexorable decline and no longer had the unrivalled control over the masses of Zaghloul’s day. King Farouk, who now enjoyed the advantage over his father of being in control of his own secret police as well as the paramilitary youth movement, made the active independent politician Ali Maher his
chef de cabinet
. In December 1937 he felt strong enough to dismiss the Wafd ‘for having violated the spirit of the constitution’, and in the subsequent elections, which were partially rigged, the Wafd was heavily defeated. In August 1939, barely two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, the king felt able to appoint Ali Maher prime minister.

However, although the Wafd’s power was in decline, the king still had to reckon with the British embassy, and this was now in
de facto
alliance with the Wafd. Although Lampson in theory no longer enjoyed Cromer’s degree of authority, he behaved as if he did, and his treatment of the young king recalled Cromer’s handling of the rebellious Khedive Abbas Hilmi forty years earlier. Lampson referred to him contemptuously as ‘the Boy’ and assured the Foreign Office that he was perfectly capable of dealing with him. Farouk, who had detested Lampson from the moment when Lampson arrived in Egypt, lacked the courage and strength of character to stand his
ground against the British embassy on questions of genuine political importance; he could only irritate and provoke Lampson in minor matters, such as keeping him waiting for appointments.

Nevertheless, a
modus vivendi
would probably have been reached if it had not been for the outbreak of war in 1939. This vastly increased Egypt’s importance to Britain as a military base and, at the same time, strengthened Lampson’s hand in his dealings with the king.

(b) The Mandates

The system of mandates set up by the League of Nations under Article 22 of its Covenant was unprecedented. It was also a form of compromise. While the victorious powers in the First World War wished to retain the former German colonies and the territories of the Ottoman Empire which in most cases they had made great sacrifices to conquer, they had made frequent pledges that their inhabitants would not be handed back to their former masters. They had also made solemn undertakings that the annexation of territory was not their aim in war. The outstanding example was the Anglo-French declaration about the former Ottoman provinces of 5 November 1918.

The mandates were not colonies but a form of trust in which the mandatary power administered the territory under the supervision of the League of Nations through a Permanent Mandates Commission. The supreme council of the League defined the terms of the mandates and the boundaries of the territories. The United States was not a member of the League but, as one of the former Allies, insisted that its consent to the mandates was necessary, and all mandate proposals were therefore submitted to the United States, which approved them on condition that ‘free and equal treatment in law and in fact was secured to the commerce of all nations.’

It must be said that some British and French statesmen regarded the distinction between mandates and colonies as no more than a
fiction. One of the frankest was the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, who told the House of Lords on 25 June 1920,