Saturday, July 30, 2022

Egypt’s 70-year-old revolution

Hussein Haridy
Friday 29 Jul 2022

Egypt’s 23 July Revolution, 70 years old this month, was a watershed moment in shaping the destiny of the modern country


Millions of Egyptians awoke on Wednesday 23 July 1952 to hear the news over the radio – there was no TV in Egypt back then – that the army in a “blessed movement” had seized power in the country.

The intervention of the military in politics had come after a very turbulent period in modern Egyptian history immediately after the end of World War II that had included widespread demonstrations by students and workers against deteriorating living conditions, the Palestine War of 1948, the political instability of a regime that had started to lose control over events, and the inability of the palace and the governing elites to negotiate the end of the British occupation of Egypt dating back to 1882.

There was a fierce confrontation between Egypt’s leftists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which was scheming to seize power at the earliest possible opportunity through an ad-hoc alliance with the powers that be in order to change the status quo.

The majority parliamentary party, the Wafd, came to power in 1950 amidst rising national fervour against the British occupying forces. Under enormous political, economic, and social pressure, the Wafd government repealed the 1936 Treaty with the British, an act that triggered an armed resistance movement against British forces in the Suez Canal Zone where the largest British military base in the Middle East was located.

On 25 January 1952, the Egyptian police in Ismailia rejected a British ultimatum to lay down their arms. A bloody battle ensued in which dozens of Egyptian policemen lost their lives. On the following day, 26 January, Cairo burned for more than ten hours until the army belatedly intervened to regain control. Some 700 people died, and many Western institutions were ransacked and destroyed.

Many years later, I had the opportunity to discuss these events with Fouad Serageldin, the minister of the interior in the Wafd government at the time, who was a very influential politician and had occupied the post of the party’s secretary-general. I asked him who was responsible for setting Cairo ablaze. I still remember his reply that the responsible parties were the palace, the British, and the Muslim Brothers. The former two had done so in order to get rid of the Wafd government, he said, while the Muslim Brothers wanted to create chaos as a prelude to seizing power.

On the morning after the blaze, then King Farouk dissolved the 1950 parliament and appointed a new government. By July that year, Egypt had had three governments. The time for radical political, economic and social changes was long overdue.

In the two-year period from July 1952 to October 1954 the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) that took power on 23 July changed the course of Egyptian history. First, it enacted the agrarian reform law of 9 September 1952 limiting the amount of land that could be owned by individuals to 200 feddans and redistributing the rest to the peasantry. Second, it adopted a republican system of government in Egypt on 18 June 1953. Third, it signed a withdrawal agreement with the British in October 1954.

The leaders of the revolution wanted at first to concentrate their energies and the limited resources of the country on internal reform, with special attention being paid to developing and improving industrial production, public health, and education. They also wanted to modernise the Egyptian military through cooperation with the US.

The Americans were not very enthusiastic and promised rifles and machine guns. But that was not what the members of the RCC were thinking of. They wanted a modern army that could defend the country when some Western powers, France, for example, were providing Israel with modern tanks and fighter planes.

The parting of the ways between Egypt and the West came on 28 February 1955. At dawn on that day, an Israeli commando unit led by a then obscure major by the name of Ariel Sharon raided an Egyptian military outpost in Al-Arish killing almost 60 soldiers.

This was a turning point for the young revolutionary leaders led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser. The former Soviet Union entered the Middle East through Chinese mediation and agreed to provide Egypt with the weapons it needed. At the same time, Egypt launched the Non-Aligned Movement with the former Yugoslavia, India, Indonesia, China, and other developing countries at Bandung in Indonesia in April 1955. Cairo also recognised the People’s Republic of China, a decision that angered then US president Dwight Eisenhower.

Two major regional and international issues proved challenging for the revolution, namely Israel and the Cold War. The former sought to destabilise any Arab or regional power that threatened it, and the latter saw an ongoing confrontation between the US-led West and the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.

The July Revolution was a watershed moment in shaping the destiny of modern Egypt. It capped a 72-year-old national struggle for freedom in Egypt and in the conduct of its foreign relations. It was also a classic case of the relations between the military and society and of the complete identification of the two. This identification manifested itself again in the 2011 and 2013 Revolutions.

French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote a biography of Nasser that covered his thinking in the 1960s. He asked the Egyptian leader what his most enduring legacy would be. According to Lacouture, Nasser stayed silent for a moment and then repeated the famous slogan of the early days of the revolution: “Lift up your head, my brother, the age of colonialism has ended.”

Perhaps this was the most enduring legacy of the revolution for generations of Egyptians.

Hussein Haridy
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 28 July, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

The House of Mohamed Ali — (5) The fall

Tarek Osman
Friday 29 Jul 2022

King Farouk, the last reigning monarch of the House of Mohamed Ali, left Egypt forever almost exactly 70 years ago.

The fall of King Farouk was not a surprise. British archives show that perceptive Egypt-observers at the British foreign office, as well as at the US State Department, had foreseen Farouk’s end.

It was a sad story. His patriotism and smartness could not subdue the insecurity and pain that had tormented him for years. He left Egypt, like his grandfather Ismail 70 years before him, for an exile that although it glittered with pleasure extinguished in him the spark of life. He died away from his country and family after a night of heavy dining at the age of 45.

But was the drama of one man’s life the cause of the fall of a house that for over a century was by far the most powerful, stable, and sophisticated of the region’s royal families? Destiny does not always make the right men kings, as a famous quotation from the novel the Prisoner of Zenda goes.

Perhaps some men (and women) are born to fail, and through their failure they fulfil a destiny that transcends their own lives.

The House of Mohamed Ali, as discussed in the previous article in this series, had reached major heights, and its achievements had placed it at the pinnacle of any serious history of royalty in the wider Middle East. But seeds of destruction had been laid down within its rule, and these had spread, growing over the years into poisonous weeds.

Failing to truly belong to Egypt was the first of these. Mohamed Ali created a modern state in Egypt, but it was a state for himself and his family. His son Ibrahim tried to develop that state into an empire. But that also was by and for the family.

The question of belonging – of whether the Mohamed Ali state was truly Egyptian – came to the fore in the aftermath of Ismail’s project for the country, the subject of the third article in this series. The emergence, rise, and growth of an Egyptian upper-middle class, well educated, able to engage with and lead the modernisation that was taking place in the country in the early 20th century, and with economic interests to protect and ambitions to grow, made the question of identity crucial.

The Mohamed Ali Dynasty failed to find an answer to that question. From the time of Mohamed Ali and up until that of King Fouad, King Farouk’s father, the family insisted on highlighting and anchoring its public image in its Albanian and Turkish origins and on a royal protocol devised from Ottoman as well as French and Italian models.

Even in terms of language, Arabic was almost utterly alien to the Egyptian royal court up until Farouk ascended to the throne in the mid-1930s, almost 120 years after the House of Mohamed Ali had come to rule Egypt.

Identity matters. It connects the ruler to the heritage of the land through a link that transcends utilitarianism and the mere accounting of the costs and benefits of any ruler’s record. This link signifies representation and the fact that the ruler is for and of the land and its history and culture that he rules. Failing to anchor its rule on some understanding of Egyptian identity created a subtle but growing legitimacy problem for the House of Mohamed Ali.

The problem was exacerbated in the period after World War I. The Ottoman Empire fell; US president Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of the right of all nations to self-determination found receptive ears in Egypt; and revolts in the Indian subcontinent against British rule became examples for rejecting colonialism in Egypt.

Powerful populist forces wanting to see Egypt’s independence from Britain built colossal constituencies in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. Their message was anchored on a nationalist and secular identity that eschewed and often vehemently rejected Ottoman as well as Western affiliations. Amidst such tumultuous fights over Egyptian identity, the Mohamed Ali Dynasty offered nothing meaningful. It neither endorsed the independence movement nor attempted to provide its own definition of what Egyptian identity in a changing world was.

The acquiescence to foreign rule was partly to blame. The khedive Tawfik, Ismail’s son, is usually demonised in modern Egyptian history for seeking the support of Britain in the face of a rebellion by the armed forces against the political structure of the 1880s that strongly favoured foreigners in all walks of life. Tawfik’s decisions paved the way for the British occupation of Egypt.

But Tawfik was not the only ruler of the House of Mohamed Ali who sought Western protection against actual or potential insurrection against the family’s rule. On several occasions in the early 20th century, British heavy-handedness and the strong British military presence in the country ultimately guaranteed the family’s rule.

By the end of the 1940s, and as independence movements spread across the region, the family was widely perceived to be inextricably dependent upon the foreign domination of the country.

The fall of political liberalism in Egypt exacerbated an already simmering situation. Egypt was a key theatre of military operations in World War II, leading Britain to effectively take control of the country’s domestic politics. This marked the end of the liberal political experiment that flourished in Egypt in the period between World Wars I and II.

The collapse of liberalism coincided with the rise of a war economy accompanied by its classical effects of inflation, corruption, and rising inequality. The royal family and particularly King Farouk were among the financial beneficiaries of the blurring of money and power. Rather than rise to protect arguably the most valuable jewel of Egypt’s liberal age – real democracy, free representation, and the beginning of what could have evolved into true respect for human rights – Farouk and the most influential powers in the palace relished the return to a system in which the crown was the final arbiter of politics.

Yet, even in accumulating power and exercising it with increasingly few checks, Farouk was neither assertive nor decisive. He was hardly interested in politics; often equivocated; and surrounded himself with a group of corrupt yes-men. He lacked Mohamed Ali’s and Ibrahim’s ruthlessness and Ismail’s determination. Even in the face of clear dangers, such as when his secret police informed him early in 1952 that a group of officers was plotting to overthrow him, he procrastinated and failed to act decisively.

Egyptians detect weakness and disdain it. Many came to see Farouk as weak. By the early 1950s, he was shouldering the immense pain of successive personal tragedies. For most Egyptians, however, contempt for him trumped sympathy. When his yacht Al-Mahrousa, meaning “the protected,” a name historically used to designate Egypt, left Alexandria taking him into exile in Italy, scores of Egyptians took to the streets to celebrate the end of an era. The House of Mohamed Ali thus fell after 150 years of ruling Egypt.

Many young Egyptians today know very little about Mohamed Ali, Ibrahim, Ismail, Tawfik, Fouad, and Farouk, let alone other members of the former ruling family. But their history is important not only because, as an Egyptian saying goes, history in our country lives in every corner, but also because modern Egypt is to a large extent the product of the House of Mohamed Ali.

 
Tarek Osman
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).

*A version of this article appears in print in the 28 July, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.

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