Arabs (39 page)

E
gyptian nationalists looked on Iraq’s accomplishments with great envy. Though the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was not so different in content from Egypt’s 1922 treaty with Britain (which conceded nominal independence to Egypt), the Iraqis had secured Britain’s nomination for admission to that exclusive club of independent states, the League of Nations. This became the benchmark of success by which nationalists in other Arab countries would measure their own accomplishments. As the Arab country with the longest tradition of nationalist activity, Egypt should have
led the way toward independence from European colonial rule—or so thought the political elite. In the course of the 1930s, the Wafd, Egypt’s leading nationalist party, came under growing public pressure to secure independence from Britain.

During the interwar years, Egypt achieved the highest degree of multiparty democracy in the modern history of the Arab world. The Constitution of 1923 introduced political pluralism, regular elections to a two-chamber legislature, full male suffrage, and a free press. A number of new parties emerged on the political stage. Elections attracted massive turnout at the polls. Journalists plied their trade with remarkable liberty.

This liberal era is remembered more for its divisive factionalism than as a golden age of Egyptian politics. Three distinct authorities sought preeminence in Egypt: the British, the monarchy, and, through Parliament, the Wafd. The rivalry between these three proved very disruptive to politics in Egypt. In his efforts to protect the monarchy from parliamentary scrutiny, King Fuad (r. 1917–1936) tended to oppose the nationalist Wafd party even more than the British. The Wafd, for their part, alternated between fighting the British for independence and promoting the powers of Parliament over the monarchy. The British alternately worked with the king to undermine the Wafd when they were in power, and with the Parliament to undermine the king when the Wafd was out of power. The political elites were a fractious bunch whose internecine squabbles played into the hands of both the king and the British. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that little progress was made in securing Egypt’s independence from Britain.

Egyptians first went to the polls in 1924. Sa’d Zaghlul (1859–1927), hero of the nationalist movement of 1919, led his Wafd party to a sweeping victory and took 90 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. King Fuad named Zaghlul prime minister and invited him to form a government, which took office in March 1924. Buoyed by the public mandate of his election returns, Zaghlul immediately entered into negotiations with the British to secure Egypt’s complete independence, compromised only by the four “reserved points” of the 1922 treaty: British control over the Suez Canal, the right to base British troops in Egypt, preservation of the foreign legal privileges known as the Capitulations, and British dominance in Sudan.

Sudan was a particular sticking point. The Egyptians had first conquered Sudan during the reign of Muhammad ’Ali in the 1820s. Driven from the territory by the Mahdi’s Revolt (1881–1885), the Egyptians joined forces with the British to reconquer Sudan in the late 1890s. In 1899 Lord Cromer devised a novel form of colonialism called a “condominium,” which allowed Britain to add Sudan to its empire in collaboration with the Egyptians. Since then, both Britain and Egypt claimed Sudan was actually their own. Egyptian nationalists rejected Britain’s claim to absolute discretion over Sudan in the 1922 treaty and demanded preservation of the
“unity of the Nile Valley.” This issue, more than any other of the four reserved points, provoked greatest tension between the Egyptians and the British.

Tensions led to violence on November 19, 1924, when a band of Egyptian nationalists shot and killed the governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, as he drove through downtown Cairo. The stunned British government nonetheless used the assassination to secure their objectives in Sudan. Egypt’s high commissioner, Lord Allenby, presented Prime Minister Zaghlul with a punitive seven-point ultimatum, including changes to the status quo in Sudan. When Zaghlul refused to comply with British demands in Sudan (to withdraw all Egyptian soldiers and to allow Nile irrigation for a British agricultural scheme), Allenby gave orders to the Sudan government to implement Britain’s demands over the Egyptian prime minister’s objections. Zaghlul’s position was untenable, and he tendered his resignation on November 24. King Fuad named a royalist to form the next government and dissolved the Parliament, effectively sidelining the nationalists in the Wafd. As Zaghlul watched the British and the king enhance their powers at the Wafd’s expense, he famously remarked: “The bullets that were fired were not targeted at the chest of Sir Lee Stack; they were targeted at mine.”
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In fact, Zaghlul never did return to power, dying on August 23, 1927, at the age of sixty-eight. Zaghlul would be replaced by lesser men, whose factionalism and in-fighting eroded public confidence in their political leaders.

 

If the Wafd’s Sa’d Zaghlul was the hero of Egypt’s liberal age, then Ismail Sidqi was certainly its villain. Sidqi had gone to the Paris Peace Conference with the Wafd delegation in 1919, only to fall out with Zaghlul and be expelled from the party on his return to Egypt. He was one of the architects of the 1922 treaty conferring limited independence on Egypt—which Zaghlul had always opposed. The further Sidqi fell from Zaghlul’s graces, the greater he grew in King Fuad’s esteem. By 1930 Sidqi and his monarch were united by a common goal of destroying the Wafd party under its new leader, Mustafa al-Nahhas.

The Wafd swept to power once again in January 1930 after a landslide victory in the 1929 elections in which the nationalist party secured a record 212 of 235 parliamentary seats. The king invited al-Nahhas to form a government. Given his electoral mandate, al-Nahhas entered into a new round of negotiations with British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson to secure Egypt’s illusive independence. Between March 31 and May 8, the governments of Egypt and Britain engaged in extensive negotiations. The two sides came to a deadlock over Sudan, with Britain insisting on separating discussion of Egypt’s independence and Sudan’s future, and the Egyptians refusing independence exclusive of Sudan. The breakdown in Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided an opportunity for the Wafd’s enemies—the king and rival parties—to call for a new government. Al-Nahhas tendered his government’s resignation in June 1930.
In the summer of 1930 the king and the British were in agreement: the government had to be placed in a “safe pair of hands.” Sidqi was the obvious candidate.

The king’s chamberlain called on Sidqi at his gentleman’s club in Cairo to sound out his willingness to form a minority government. “I am honoured by His Majesty’s confidence in me,” Sidqi replied, “but I wish to inform him, should he decide to appoint me at this critical juncture, that my policies would start from a clean slate and that I would reorganize parliamentary life in accordance with my views on the Constitution and the need for stable government.”
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Sidqi’s response only confirmed the king’s high opinion of the man. Sidqi had already declared his hostility to liberal democracy, denouncing the “parliamentary autocracy which the 1923 Constitution afforded, with the tyranny of the majority over the minority.” He wanted to free government from constitutional bonds and rule by decree in partnership with the king. The king sent his chamberlain to inform Sidqi that he was “very comfortable with his policies” and invited him to form a cabinet.

Taking the helm of government for the first time in June 1930, Sidqi consolidated his grip over government by claiming three cabinet portfolios. In addition to the premiership, he assumed control of the ministries of finance and the interior. Fuad and Sidqi worked together to dissolve the Parliament, postpone elections, and draft a new constitution conferring yet more power on the king. For the next three years, Egypt’s parliamentary democracy was overthrown and the country ruled by royal decree.

Sidqi made no attempt to hide his autocratic politics and his disregard for the democratic process. “It was inevitable that I would suspend the Parliament” at the end of June 1930, Sidqi confided in his memoirs, “in order to proceed to the reorganization that I had come to initiate.” When al-Nahhas and his colleagues called for mass demonstrations protesting the suspension of the Parliament, Sidqi did not hesitate to crush the movement. “I did not wait until this opposition turned to a civil war” before taking action, Sidqi explained. He sent out the army to break up the demonstrations, and violence ensued. Three days after the royal decree that terminated the parliamentary session, twenty-five demonstrators were killed in Alexandria; nearly 400 were wounded. “Unfortunately,” Sidqi continued, with the moustache-twirling panache of a vaudeville villain, “painful events occurred in Cairo, Alexandria and some rural cities. The government had no alternative but to preserve order and prevent the offenders from disturbing public order and breaking the law.”
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The British cautioned both Prime Minister Sidqi and nationalist leader al-Nahhas but did not interfere in a fight that would divert the Egyptians from their pursuit of greater freedom from British rule.

Sidqi justified his political philosophy on grounds that, in a time of economic troubles, leaders could only achieve progress and prosperity through peace and order. The crash of 1929 had ushered in a global depression that had left its mark on the Egyptian economy, and in the face of economic disruption, Sidqi viewed the Wafd
and its brand of mass politics as a grave threat to public order. In October 1930, Sidqi introduced a new constitution that expanded the powers of the king at the expense of the Wafd. It reduced the number of deputies in the Parliament from 235 to 150 and gave the king control over the upper chamber by expanding the proportion of appointed senators from 40 to 60 percent, leaving only a minority to be chosen by popular vote. Sidqi’s constitution reduced universal suffrage, replacing the system of direct elections to a more complex two-stage voting process, in which the voting age was increased for the first round and introducing restrictions to the second round of voting based on financial criteria or levels of education. These measures served to take voting power from the masses (on whose support the Wafd relied) and concentrate electoral authority in the propertied elite. The powers of the legislature were reduced, as the length of the parliamentary session was reduced from six to five months, and the king’s powers to defer bills were expanded.

The new constitution was blatantly autocratic and provoked nearly unanimous opposition from politicians across the political spectrum and the general public. When the press criticized Sidqi and the 1930 Constitution, he simply closed the papers down and locked the journalists up. Even those who initially supported Sidqi found their papers closed. The journalists responded by printing underground leaflets that made virulent attacks against the autocratic government and its authoritarian constitution.

Sidqi formed his own party in 1931, when parliamentary elections loomed under the terms of the new constitution. Ever the political loner who had consistently eschewed party affiliation, Sidqi knew that he needed a party behind him to secure a parliamentary majority. He called his new party the People’s Party, an inversion of reality worthy of George Orwell’s
1984
. Sidqi attracted ambitious defectors from the Liberal Constitutional Party, and from the palace’s own Unity Party—men of the elite, not of the people. The party’s program gave ample material for satirists in the opposition press, pledging “assistance to the constitutional order,” the “preservation of the people’s sovereignty” and upholding “the rights of the throne” (King Fuad
had
chosen well).
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The Wafd and the Liberal Constitutional Party both boycotted the elections of May 1931, and Sidqi’s People’s Party achieved an outright majority. His autocratic revolution seemed on the verge of success.

Yet ultimately Sidqi failed. His autocratic reforms provoked opposition from the real people’s party, the Wafd, and the other major political parties. The press, refusing to be silenced, kept up a steady barrage to turn public opinion against Sidqi’s government. Security conditions began to deteriorate as the public grew more outspoken against Sidqi’s government. Sidqi had always justified autocratic rule in terms of providing law and order. Faced with growing disorder, the British began to pressure for a new government to restore public confidence and curb political violence. Sidqi’s revolution had stalled and was now coming undone. In September 1933 the king
dismissed his prime minister. Down but not out, Sidqi would remain one of Egypt’s most influential politicians until his death in 1950.

King Fuad made a brief stab at absolute rule. He repealed Sidqi’s 1930 Constitution by royal decree without restoring the earlier 1923 Constitution, and he dissolved the Parliament elected in 1931 without calling for new elections. The king assumed full power over Egypt for a transition period of unspecified duration. Needless to say, these measures were no more successful in restoring public confidence in the Egyptian government, and King Fuad came under pressure from both the British and the Wafd to restore Egypt’s 1923 Constitution and prepare for new elections. On December 12, 1935, King Fuad conceded defeat and decreed the restoration of the original constitution.