A History of the Middle East (37 page)

This humiliation of the monarchy was a seminal event in the modern history of Egypt. For all his faults, the king still personified Egypt, and nationalist opinion was outraged. One senior officer,
General Muhammad Neguib, requested the king’s permission to resign from the Egyptian army. The 24-year-old Lieutenant Gamal Abdul Nasser, then stationed in Sudan, was one of a group of young officers who began to dream of taking action to restore Egypt’s army.

At this crucial point in the desert war, Britain was concerned only with securing the Egyptian domestic front. Rommel’s forces continued their advance, to reach within sixty miles of Alexandria. Exhausted and low in morale, some thousands of British troops deserted and hid in the Delta. As the British embassy burned its files, the British civilians in Egypt came close to panic. Women and children were sent by train to Palestine. But Nahas and his government, having thrown in their lot with Britain, kept their nerve. They interned all suspected Axis sympathizers, including Ali Maher, and refused to accept the inevitability of German occupation even when Rommel’s radio was triumphantly announcing his imminent arrival in Cairo.

In August 1942 Churchill came to Cairo and it was agreed that General Montgomery should take over the Eighth Army. On 23 October the battle of Alamein, a turning-point in the war, marked the beginning of the Axis decline in the Middle East. Within seven months the remaining German and Italian forces had evacuated North Africa. The war receded from Egypt, but the country became an even vaster war base for the Allies, with some 200,000 troops either stationed, in transit or on leave in Egypt. An American presence made itself felt, and the Anglo-American Middle East Supply Centre made Egypt the focus of the Allied war effort in the Middle East and North Africa.

Reza Shah of Iran was less fortunate than Farouk. His country was strategically as important as Egypt to the Allies, and the huge German advances after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 raised the possibility of a German occupation of Iran and its oilfields. Since Russia and Britain had long been the aggressive imperialist powers in Iranian eyes, nationalist sentiment, especially among the ruling class and senior army officers, tended to be pro-German.
The Nazi regime had begun seizing the advantage before the war. German companies played a leading role in Iranian industrialization, German propaganda was vigorous and Nazi agents were active throughout the country.

As soon as the Soviet Union entered the war, it began to demand that German agents and saboteurs should be curbed. Reza Shah appealed to the United States to support Iran’s neutrality but the United States, although still not a belligerent, was already bound by the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 to help Britain to supply the Soviet Union with arms through Iran. Washington was unsympathetic and urged Reza Shah to help the Allies ‘to stop Hitler’s ambition of world conquest’.

The crisis came to a head when the Iranian government officially rejected a joint Soviet and British request to send arms supplies across the country to the Soviet Union. On 25 August 1941 Soviet and British troops invaded Iran simultaneously from the north and south. Iraq provided a convenient base for the British invasion following the replacement of the Rashid Ali government by a pro-British regime. Iranian troops could offer little resistance, and on 16 September Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his 23-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In January 1942 a tripartite treaty of alliance was concluded with Britain and the Soviet Union, both of which undertook ‘to respect the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Iran’ and ‘to defend Iran by all means at their command from aggression’. Britain and the Soviet Union defined their respective zones, with the British occupying the south, centre and west and the Russians holding the three northern provinces of Azerbaijan, Gilan and Mazandaran.

The Russians claimed the right of intervention under the terms of the Persian–Soviet treaty of 1921. However, the new agreement stated that the Soviet and British forces permitted to remain on Iranian soil did not constitute an occupation and would be withdrawn not later than six months after the end of the war. In return, Iran undertook to render non-specified military assistance to the Allies. In September 1943 Iran declared war on Germany. In December,
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, after holding their first joint meeting in Tehran, issued a declaration expressing their desire for the maintenance of the ‘independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity’ of Iran.

The US role in Iran steadily increased during the war, and by 1945 there were 30,000 American troops in the country, although they were non-combatants employed in dispatching supplies to Russia and managing the Trans-Iranian Railway, and they operated as part of the British forces, who were responsible for law and order.

Middle East Reactions: Nationalism, Pan-Arabism and Islam

Italy’s surrender in 1943 and the removal of the threat of a German invasion of the Middle East enhanced Britain’s position in the region. However, the new situation also meant that Britain was less able to use the overriding exigencies of the war to maintain control over political developments. The minority of Middle Easterners – Arabs and Iranians – who had calculated on an Axis victory to secure their nationalist demands had been disappointed. This did not mean that the majority abandoned their aim of securing the removal of European domination.

The situation in Syria and Lebanon was unusual in that Britain had helped Charles de Gaulle’s Free French to oust the Vichy regime in 1941 on the understanding that France would recognize the two countries’ independence. This was declared by General Catroux, de Gaulle’s representative, before the invasion of the Free French force and was underwritten by Britain with the somewhat ambiguous formula that Britain would recognize that France had a predominant position over the other European powers once the promises of independence had been carried out.

De Gaulle, however, did not believe that the Free French had liberated Syria and Lebanon in order to give them up. He wished to secure treaties based on the 1936 agreements which fell well short
of independence. The Syrians almost unanimously rejected the idea of a treaty, hoping to bring matters to a crisis while British troops were still present.

Even in Lebanon, in spite of the traditional Maronite reliance on French protection, the desire for independence was dominant. The new mercantile classes, both Christian and Muslim, felt strong enough to stand by themselves without French protection and they disliked the mandate’s limitations on their activities. In 1943 an unwritten ‘National Pact’ was reached between certain Christian and Muslim leaders to the effect that Lebanon should remain independent within its existing frontiers but should follow an independent Arab foreign policy. Elections held in the same year led to the victory of those opposed to the mandate, and the new government proposed to remove from the constitution those clauses which safeguarded French control. The French replied by arresting the president of the republic and most of the government. Faced with popular disturbances, world-wide protests and a British ultimatum, the French gave in. The ministers were released and the constitution amended.

Elections in Syria in 1943 also produced a clear victory for the nationalists. Gradually and reluctantly, the French began to transfer the mandates’ powers to the two governments. But they had not given up all hope, keeping the local Lebanese and Syrian armed forces under the control of the French high command as a means of securing post-independence treaties. When in May 1945 a contingent of Senegalese troops landed in Beirut, the Syrians correctly concluded that France aimed to maintain military control after the departure of the British. Fighting broke out in Damascus and the French bombarded the city. Another British ultimatum forced the French troops to return to barracks. Although these troops remained for one more year, France’s rule in the Levant had come to an end. In 1946 Syria and Lebanon joined the United Nations as independent states.

The United States and the Soviet Union, having recognized Syrian and Lebanese independence, were not prepared to accept
France’s continuing predominance, but it was Britain that France held responsible for its exclusion. Twenty years later General de Gaulle secured some measure of revenge by vetoing Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community.

Egypt was the centre of Britain’s power in the Middle East but, following the installation of the Wafd government, the country’s internal politics were not a major British concern. The Wafd, although still confident that it was the expression of the popular will, was sensitive to charges that it had been placed in power by the British. It claimed to champion the cause of the egyptianization of the state. To the extreme irritation of the British and other foreign communities, it made the Arabic language compulsory for all official correspondence and commercial accountancy. But the reality was that Nahas was still dependent on Lampson’s support to prevent the vengeful king from dismissing him. In fact the Wafd, riddled with corruption and public scandal, was losing its mastery. Extra-parliamentary forces, of which the Muslim Brotherhood was the most significant and dangerous, were growing in strength. Rampant inflation, exacerbated by the presence of Allied forces, caused increasing public discontent with the government. The landowning class was growing richer and, as in the First World War, a new wealthy class of merchants and industrialists had grown up by supplying the foreign forces with goods and services. But the great majority of Egyptians were sinking further into poverty.

In October 1944 the king seized the chance of Lampson’s absence from the country to dismiss Nahas and replace him with Ahmed Maher, Ali Maher’s genial and very different brother. The new prime minister insisted that Egypt should at last declare war on Germany, in order to ensure its membership of the projected United Nations Organization. On 24 February 1945 Ahmed Maher announced Egypt’s declaration of war to parliament; as he left, he was assassinated. Almost certainly the act was planned by the new terrorist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Political murder was about to become a feature of Egyptian life.

Egyptians of all political parties felt that, as a reward for Egypt’s contribution to the Allied war effort, Britain should evacuate the country entirely and accept the unity of Egypt and the Sudan. But although they hoped that the Labour Party, which had just come to power in Britain, would be more sympathetic to Egyptian national aspirations, the new Labour government was chiefly concerned with maintaining Britain’s dominant military position in the Middle East and was not prepared for a revision of the 1936 treaty, which it felt had stood the test of time. Ubiquitous British troops in Cairo reminded the Egyptians of the continuing occupation. The Wafd, in opposition, anxious to renew its nationalist credentials, encouraged anti-British agitation. In February 1946 strikes and demonstrations led to violent rioting in which Muslim Brothers and communists as well as the Wafd all played a role.

The aged but still formidable Sidky Pasha was recalled to power. He acted to control the demonstrations, although some attacks on British soldiers and civilians continued. He insisted that Britain should negotiate, and by now the Labour government was ready to respond. The British military and the Conservative opposition, led by Winston Churchill, maintained that Egypt was an essential Western base for a regional defence system. A crisis with the Soviet Union over Iran had already marked the onset of the Cold War. But the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was prepared to agree to the principle of total evacuation provided the Suez base could be reactivated in the event of renewed war in the Middle East (which by now to the Western powers meant a Soviet invasion of one of the countries in the region). Field Marshal Montgomery, who visited Egypt in the summer of 1946, agreed that Britain could evacuate the Suez base provided it maintained troops in Palestine, Libya and Cyprus. But he also ominously insisted that Britain ‘must remain strong in the Sudan, in case of difficulties with the Egyptians’. It was necessary ‘to control the Nile, the life-blood of Egypt’.

The old obstruction to the ending of the British occupation of Egypt remained. Although Sidky swiftly reached agreement with
Bevin on a total British evacuation in three years, they glossed over the Sudan issue, saying that the 1899 condominium agreement would remain until, after consultation with the Sudanese, a new common agreement could be reached on the Sudan’s future status ‘within the framework of the unity between the Sudan and Egypt under the common Crown of Egypt’.

The Egyptians understandably interpreted this as meaning that Britain had accepted Farouk as king of Egypt and the Sudan. But the British government, with strident support from British officials in the Sudan, soon made it clear that it had no such intention. Instead it began to institute moves towards Sudanese self-government. Anglo-Egyptian relations remained as bad as ever. Britain did unilaterally fulfil part of the terms of the Sidky–Bevin agreement, as all troops were withdrawn from the Delta to the Suez Canal zone; however, there were over seven times as many as the 10,000 stipulated in the 1936 treaty.

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In March 1945 the League of Arab States had been established, with Britain’s blessing. It had its headquarters in Cairo and an Egyptian secretary-general. But the founding members, who were the seven Arab states which had achieved independence – Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon – ensured that the League was in no way a federation. Each member retained its full sovereignty, and decisions taken by the Arab League Council were binding only on those members which had voted for them.

Although the League was theoretically inspired by the doctrine of pan-Arab unity, this remained a fragile and undeveloped ideology. As long as the Ottoman Empire remained in existence, the great majority of Arabs, whatever their grievances against the Turks, assumed that the empire would remain the leader of the Muslim world. Only Christian Arabs of the Levant, who felt no such loyalty, thought seriously of secession, but they found little response among their Muslim fellow-Arabs. A few intellectuals such as Rashid Rida or al-Kawakibi argued that the Turks had forfeited their right to Muslim leadership and that Islam would be best served by a return
to an Arab caliphate. But this hardly amounted to a programme for political action.