Arabs (25 page)

In his memoirs Urabi idealized the army as a meritocracy, in which promotion was awarded through examination, “and those who excelled over their peers would be promoted to the appropriate rank.”
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Urabi clearly performed well in examination. In just six years, between 1854 and 1860, he rose from a common soldier to become, at the age of nineteen, Egypt’s youngest colonel ever. Urabi was devoted to Said Pasha, the viceroy who had opened the oficer corps to native Egyptians.

With the accession of Ismail Pasha in 1863, the new viceroy reverted to the traditional bias that privileged Turkish-speaking officers in the Egyptian army. Henceforth, patronage and ethnicity would displace merit as the basis of advancement in the military. The ambitious Urabi ran into a glass ceiling imposed by the Turco-Circassian elites. Through the whole of the sixteen-year reign of Ismail (r. 1863–1879), Urabi did not receive a single promotion. The experience embittered him against his superiors in the military and the viceroys of Egypt.

Urabi’s conflict with the Turko-Circassian elites began almost immediately after Ismail ascended to power. Placed under the command of a Circassian general named Khusru Pasha, Urabi complained, “He showed a blind favouritism for men of his own race, and when he discovered me to be a pureblood [Egyptian] national, my presence in the regiment distressed him. He worked to have me discharged from the regiment, to free my post to be filled by one of the sons of the Mamluks.”
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Khusru Pasha’s opportunity came when Urabi was posted to the examination board responsible for promotions—the one institution that ensured soldiers were advanced by their merit rather than their connections. Khusru Pasha ordered Urabi to falsify exam results to promote a Circassian, and when Urabi refused, the general reported him to the minister of war for disobeying orders. The case was referred up to Khedive Ismail himself and led to Urabi’s temporary dismissal from the army and transfer to the civil service. Pardoned by the khedive in 1867, Urabi only returned
to full military service at his former rank of colonel in the spring of 1870. Yet he still harbored deep resentments against his Turco-Circassian superiors and the injustice they had made him suffer.

The 1870s were years of frustration for the Egyptian army. Urabi took part in the disastrous Abyssinian Campaign, when Khedive Ismail attempted to extend Egypt’s imperial rule over the modern territories of Somalia and Ethiopia. King John of Abyssinia dealt the Egyptians a decisive defeat in March 1876, driving the invaders from his lands. The demoralized army returned home having suffered heavy casualties and military disgrace abroad to face demobilization following the 1876 bankruptcy. As one of the economic measures imposed by the European financial controllers, the Egyptian army was to be trimmed from 15,000 to a token force of 7,000 men, and 2,500 officers were to be put on half pay. In January 1879, Urabi was ordered to move his regiment from Rosetta to Cairo for demobilization.

When Urabi reached Cairo he found the city awash in Egyptian soldiers and officers awaiting demobilization. Feelings ran high among men facing the sudden end of promising military careers and imminent unemployment. A group of Egyptian army cadets and officers staged a demonstration outside the Ministry of Finance on February 18, 1879, to protest their unfair dismissal. When Prime Minister Nubar Pasha and the British minister, Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, emerged from the Ministry, the angry officers rough-handled the politicians. Urabi, who did not take part in the protest, later recounted to a British sympathizer, “They found Nubar getting into his carriage, and they assaulted him, pulled his moustache, and boxed his ears.”
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The military riot served Khedive Ismail’s purposes so well that Urabi and his colleagues suspected the viceroy of having a hand in organizing the demonstration. Ismail wanted to be rid of the French and British ministers in his cabinet and wanted greater latitude over Egypt’s budget. He argued that the stringent austerity the European financial advisors imposed were destabilizing Egypt’s internal politics and put in jeopardy its ability to honor its debts to foreign bondholders. The day after the military demonstration, Ismail accepted the resignation of Nubar’s mixed cabinet. However, the British and French were not about to indulge the khedive’s bid to regain his powers, and in June 1879 Ismail was deposed.

Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers were relieved to see Khedive Ismail depart. Yet the position of Egyptian officers only deteriorated under his successor, Khedive Tawfiq. The new minister of war, a Turco-Circassian named Uthman Rifqi Pasha, removed a number of native Egyptian officers from their posts and replaced them with men of his race. In January 1881, Urabi learned that he and a number of his colleagues were about to be dismissed in an operation he described in terms of a Mamluk restoration. “The Circassians were holding regular meetings of high and low ranking officers in the home of Khusru Pasha [Urabi’s former Circassian commander], in the presence of Uthman Rifqi Pasha, in which they celebrated the history
of the Mamluk state.... They believed they were ready to recover Egypt and all its possessions as those Mamluks had done.”
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Urabi and his colleagues decided to take action. They drafted a petition to Khedive Tawfiq setting out their grievances and demands. This petition of January 1881 marked Urabi’s entry into national politics, setting a dangerous precedent of military men intervening in politics that would recur through Arab history across the twentieth century.

Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers had three main objectives: to increase the size of the Egyptian army, overturning the cuts in troop numbers imposed by the financial controllers; to revise the regulations and establish equality among all military men without distinction by ethnicity or religion; and to appoint a native-born Egyptian officer as minister of war. Urabi seemed unaware of the contradiction between these demands, for equality
and
the preference of a native Egyptian minister.

Urabi’s demands were revolutionary for their time. When the officers’ petition was submitted to the prime minister, Riyad Pasha, he openly threatened the officers. “This petition is destructive,” he warned, “more dangerous than the petition submitted by one of your colleagues who was subsequently sent to the Sudan,” Egypt’s equivalent to Siberia.
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Yet the officers refused to withdraw their petition and asked that it be brought to the khedive’s attention.

When the khedive received Urabi’s petition, he convened an emergency session in Abdin Palace with his top military commanders. They called for the arrest of Urabi and the two officers who had signed the petition on charges of sedition, and agreed to convene a special court-martial to try the men. Urabi and his fellow officers were summoned to the Ministry of War the following day, where they were told to surrender their swords. On their way to the prison, which was located inside the ministry, the Egyptians passed through two ranks of hostile Circassian officers, and they were taunted at their prison door by Urabi’s old nemesis, Khusru Pasha. “He stood outside the cell and taunted us as ‘peasants [suitable only for] working as fruit pickers,’” Urabi recalled with bitterness.
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The arrest of Urabi and his fellow officers provoked a mutiny in the Egyptian army. In February 1881 two units of the Khedivial Guard stormed the Ministry of War. The minister and the other Circassians fled the building. The soldiers released Urabi and his officers from their cell and led them back to Abdin Palace, where they held a noisy demonstration of loyalty to Khedive Tawfiq. The soldiers remained in Abdin Square until the unpopular Circassian minister of war, Uthman Rifqi, was dismissed and a man of their choice named his successor. The khedive also issued orders for changes in the military regulations to satisfy the soldiers’ requests on pay and terms of service.

The demonstration then broke up, and the troops returned to their barracks. Calm had been restored, but the events had transformed Egyptian politics. Urabi
emerged as a popular leader, and the military had forced the khedive and his government to accept their demands.

 

The large landholders and urban elites from the disbanded Egyptian Assembly of Delegates followed the army’s successes with great interest. They recognized that they stood a much better chance of imposing their liberal constitutional reforms upon the unwilling khedive in partnership with the armed forces. Between February and September 1881, a mixed coalition of Egyptian army officers, large landholders, delegates from the Assembly, journalists, and religious scholars took shape, calling themselves the “National Party.” As the Islamic reformer Shaykh Muhammad Abduh explained to a British observer, these “were months of great political activity, which pervaded all classes. [Urabi’s] action gained him much popularity, and put him into communication with the civilian members of the National party . . . and it was we who put forward the idea of renewing the demand for a Constitution.”
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The members of this coalition each had their own objectives and grievances. What held them together was a common belief that the Egyptians deserved a better deal in their own country. They took “Egypt for the Egyptians” as their slogan, and gave their support to each other’s cause the better to promote their own. For Urabi and his fellow officers, the constitution represented constraints on the Khedive and his government that would protect them from arbitrary reprisals. It also enhanced their role as defenders of the interests of the Egyptian people rather than just the narrow interests of the military men.

To contemporary European observers the growing reform coalition appeared to be a nationalist movement, but this was not so. Urabi and his fellow reformers fully accepted Egypt’s status as an autonomous Ottoman province. Urabi regularly declared his loyalty to both the khedive and the Ottoman sultan—and was decorated by Abdulhamid II for his services. The reformists objected to the power of European ministers and consuls over Egypt’s politics and economy, and the dominance of the Turco-Circassians over the military and cabinet. When demonstrators took to the streets shouting, “Egypt for the Egyptians!” it was a call for freedom from European and Circassian interference, not for national independence.

This distinction, however, was lost on the Europeans, who interpreted the actions of the Egyptian military as the beginnings of a nationalist movement that threatened both their strategic and their financial interests. Britain and France began to discuss the best ways to respond to the Urabi threat.

The khedive followed the emergence of the opposition movement with growing concern. Already the European powers had whittled away his sovereignty, imposing European officials on his government and taking control of half of Egypt’s budget. Now his own subjects sought to clip his wings further by imposing a constitution and recalling the Assembly. Tawfiq was isolated. He could only count on the support
of the Turco-Circassian elites. In July 1881, Tawfiq dismissed the reformist cabinet and installed as minister of war his brother-in-law, a Circassian named Dawud Pasha Yegen, whom Urabi described as “an ignorant, fatuous, sinister man.”

The officers responded by organizing another demonstration outside the khedive’s palace in Abdin Square. Urabi notified the khedive on the morning of September 9, 1881, that “We will bring all of the soldiers present in Cairo to Abdin Square to present our demands to His Highness the Khedive at four in the afternoon” that same day.
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Tawfiq Pasha was alarmed at the prospect of a new military mutiny and went with his prime minister and American chief of staff, Stone Pasha, to try to rouse loyal troops at the Abdin barracks and in the Citadel to intervene against Urabi—but to no effect. Urabi engendered more loyalty from the Egyptian military men than the khedive himself.

Tawfiq was forced to receive Urabi before Abdin Palace with only his courtiers and the foreign consuls behind him. The officers presented the khedive with their demands: a new cabinet, headed by the constitutional reformer Sharif Pasha; the reconvening of the Assembly; and the expansion of troop numbers to 18,000 men. Tawfiq had no choice but to concur. The military and their civilian supporters were in control.

 

The khedive succumbed to the reformers’ pressures and reconvened the Assembly. In January 1882 the delegates submitted a draft constitution for the khedive’s consideration. The constitution was promulgated in February, and a new reformist cabinet was appointed, with Ahmad Urabi named minister of war. Colonel Urabi, who had not seen a promotion since 1863, had finally overturned the Turco-Circassian hierarchy to secure control of the Egyptian military.

There is little doubt that the Egyptian officers took the opportunity to settle old scores with the Mamluks. Former minister of war Uthman Rifqi Pasha was accused of a plot to assassinate Urabi, and fifty of his officers—all Turco-Circassians—were found guilty of the conspiracy. Many of those detained were tortured, with Urabi’s knowledge. He later confided: “I never went to the prison to see them tortured or ill-treated. I simply never went near them at all.”
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Officials in Paris and London grew increasingly alarmed by Tawfiq’s growing isolation in Cairo. The khedive’s every concession to the reform movement reduced both his authority and the influence of the great powers over Egypt’s economy. The British and French were concerned lest the khedive’s concessions give rise to political disorder in Egypt. Urabi’s presence in the government did little to assuage European concerns. Urabi forced the new prime minister, Mahmud Sami al-Barudi, to dismiss European officials appointed to the Egyptian civil service. These changes were too much, too fast, for the conservative European powers to accept. The Urabi movement was beginning to look like a revolution, and the British and French went into
action to prop up the faltering khedive’s regime. Ironically, their every action exacerbated Tawfiq’s isolation and enhanced Urabi’s standing.