CHAPTER 5
Though the colonization of Arab lands was built on foundations laid earlier, European imperialism in the Arab world began in earnest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As was noted in the previous chapter, both the spread of European technology and the financing that allowed cash-strapped Middle Eastern governments to spend beyond their means enabled the European powers to extend their influence across Ottoman domains from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. Bankruptcy in the Ottoman Empire and its autonomous provinces in North Africa lowered the barriers to more direct forms of European control.
As Europe’s interests in North Africa intensified, their incentives for outright imperial rule expanded accordingly. By the 1880s the European powers were more concerned about upholding their national interests in the Southern Mediterranean than to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The “self-denying protocol” of 1840 was a dead letter, and the partition of North Africa followed. France extended its rule over Tunisia in 1881, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Italy seized Libya in 1911, and the European powers consented to a Franco-Spanish protectorate over Morocco (the only North African state to have preserved its independence from Ottoman rule) in 1912. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the whole of North Africa had passed under direct European rule.
There were a number of reasons why European imperialism in the Arab world began in North Africa. The Arab provinces of North Africa were far from the Ottoman center of gravity and, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become increasingly autonomous of Istanbul. The Arab provinces of the Middle East—in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula—were closer to the Ottoman heartland and came to be more closely integrated to Istanbul’s rule in the course of the nineteenth-century reforms (1839–1876). Places like Tunisia and Egypt had become vassal states of the Ottoman Empire, whereas Damascus and Aleppo were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The very developments that enhanced the autonomy of North Africa—the emergence of distinct ruling families heading increasingly independent governments—left those states more vulnerable to European occupation.
THE ARAB WORLD IN THE IMPERIAL AGE, 1830-1948
Moreover, the states of North Africa were relatively close to Southern Europe—to Spain, France, and Italy in particular. Proximity had drawn these states closer to Europe’s ambit: for military aid, industrial goods, and finance capital. North Africa was the Ottoman Empire’s distant frontier but Europe’s near abroad. As Europe expanded beyond its own frontiers in a new wave of imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century, it was only natural that it should turn to its near abroad first.
There was one other reason why the states of Europe colonized North Africa: precedent. The long-standing French presence in Algeria set an important precedent for French ambitions in Tunisia and Morocco and gave Italy grounds to seek imperial satisfaction in Libya. But for the accidents of history that led to the French invasion of Algiers in 1827, the partition of much of North Africa might never have happened.
Like Tunisia, the Regency of Algiers was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire and governed by a viceroy who enjoyed great autonomy in both domestic and international affairs. The ruling elites were Turkish military men, recruited from Istanbul and organized into an administrative council, electing their leader, or dey, who enjoyed direct relations with the governments of Europe. The sultan in Istanbul formally confirmed the elected dey and claimed a tribute from Algiers. The only Ottoman official posted to Algiers was the Islamic court judge. Otherwise, the sultan’s authority over Algiers was strictly ceremonial.
The deys of Algiers exploited their autonomy to pursue their own commercial and political relations with Europe, independent of Istanbul’s control. Yet without the weight of the Ottoman Empire behind them, the deys had little leverage over their European trade partners. Thus, when the deys provided grain to France on credit—to provision French military campaigns in Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1798—their repeated pleas to the French government to honor their commitments fell on deaf ears. Decades passed without the French repaying their debts, and the deal became a growing source of friction between the two states.
By 1827, relations between the Algerian dey, Husayn Pasha (r. 1818–1830), and the French consul, Pierre Deval, reached the breaking point after the French government failed to respond to the dey’s letters demanding repayment of the grain debt. In a private conversation with Deval, Husayn Pasha lost his temper and struck the French consul with his fly whisk.
In their reports to their respective superiors, Deval and Husayn Pasha gave very different accounts of their meeting.1 To the French minister of foreign affairs, Deval claimed he found the dey in an agitated state when he called on Huseyn Pasha in his palace.
“Why has your Minister not replied to the letter I wrote him?” Husayn Pasha demanded. Deval claimed he replied in a measured tone: “I had the honour to bring you the reply as soon as I received it.” At this point, Deval reported, the dey erupted:
“‘Why did he not reply directly? Am I a clodhopper, a man of mud, a barefoot tramp? You are a wicked man, an infidel, an idolater!’ Then, rising from his seat, with the handle of his fly-whisk, he gave me three violent blows about the body and told me to retire.”
The Arab fly whisk is made from a knot of hair from a horse’s tail, attached to a handle. It is not immediately evident how one might deal “violent blows” with such an instrument. However, the French Consul was adamant that French honor was at stake. He concluded his report to the minister: “If Your Excellency does not wish to give this affair the severe and well-publicized attention that it merits, he should at least be willing to grant me permission to retire with leave.”
In his own report to the Ottoman grand vezir, the dey acknowledged striking Deval with his whisk, though only after provocation. He explained that he had written three times to the French asking for repayment, without receiving the courtesy of a reply. He raised the matter with the French consul “in courteous terms and with a deliberately friendly attitude.”
“Why did no reply come to my letters written and sent to your [i.e., the French] Government?” The Consul, in stubbornness and arrogance, replied in offensive terms that “the King and state of France may not send replies to letters which you have addressed to them.” He dared to blaspheme the Muslim religion and showed contempt for the honour of His Majesty [the sultan], protector of the world. Unable to endure this insult, which exceeded all bearable limits, and having recourse to the courage natural only to Muslims, I hit him two or three times with light blows of the fly-whisk which I held in my humble hand.
Whatever the truth of these two irreconcilable accounts, it was clear that by 1827 the French had no intention of honoring debts incurred three decades earlier—and the Algerians were unwilling to forgive the debts. After the fly-whisk incident, the French demanded reparations for the damage done to France’s honor while the Algerians continued to insist on repayment of France’s long-overdue debts. The dispute left the two sides on a collision course in which the Algerians refused to back down, and the French could not afford to.
The French responded to the dey’s “insults” with ultimatums. They demanded the Algerians make a gun salute to the French flag, which the dey refused. The French then imposed a blockade on the port of Algiers, which did more harm to the merchants of Marseilles than to Algerian corsairs, whose swift ships easily slipped through the over-extended French line of ships enforcing the blockade. After a two-year stalemate, the French sought a face-saving solution and dispatched a diplomat to negotiate with the dey. The Algerians fired a few cannon at his flagship, preventing the negotiator from even disembarking. The Algerian imbroglio was turning into a major embarrassment for the beleaguered government of French king Charles X.
Charles X (r. 1824–1830) faced serious opposition at home as well as abroad. His efforts to restore some absolutism to the French monarchy, turning the clock back to pre-Revolutionary times, reached a crisis when he suspended the Constitutional Charter (described at length by Rifa’a al-Tahtawi in his study of France) in 1830. His premiere, Prince Jules de Polignac, suggested that a foreign adventure might rally public opinion behind the throne. Polignac recognized that France had to overcome opposition from the other European powers—Britain in particular—to a measure that inevitably would alter the balance of power in the Mediterranean. He dispatched ambassadors to London and the other courts of Europe to set out the objectives of the impending invasion of Algeria as the complete destruction of piracy, the total abolition of Christian slavery, and the termination of all tribute paid by European states to the Regency to ensure the security of their shipping. Polignac hoped to gain international support for the French invasion of Algiers by claiming to uphold such universal interests.
In June 1830 a French expedition of 37,000 troops landed to the west of Algiers. It quickly defeated the dey’s forces and entered the city of Algiers on July 4. This triumph was not enough to save Charles X, who was overthrown later that month in the July Revolution of 1830. The Egyptian scholar Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who was living in Paris at the time, noted how the French showed far more satisfaction at overthrowing an unpopular king than in the conquest of Algiers, “which,” he argued, “was based on specious motives.”2 Nonetheless, the French remained in possession of Algiers well after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, one of the few enduring legacies of the undistinguished reign of Charles X. Husayn Pasha’s capitulation on July 5, 1830, brought to a close three centuries of Ottoman history and marked the beginning of 132 years of French rule over Algeria.
Although the French had defeated the Turkish garrison at Algiers, this victory did not give them control over the country at large. So long as the French confined their ambitions to the main coastal towns, they were unlikely to encounter much organized resistance in Algeria. European powers had long held strategic ports on the North African coast. The French occupation of Algiers in July 1830 and of Oran in January 1831 was not so different from the Spanish position in their presidios in Ceuta and Melilla (which remain Spanish possessions today). But the French were not satisfied with holding the main towns. They hoped to colonize the fertile coastal plain with French settlers in a policy known as “restrained occupation.” It was a policy that inevitably would alienate the indigenous people of Algeria.
The Algerian population was made up of fiercely independent Arabs and Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic community that converted to Islam after the seventh-century Islamic conquests. With their own language and customs, the Berber population is spread across North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Morocco. The Arabs and Berbers had preserved their independence from the deys of Algiers and resisted every attempt by the Turkish garrison to tax them or impose Ottoman rule outside the major cities of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran. Thus, they shed no tears over the fall of the Regency. Even so, the Berbers and Arabs in the Algerian countryside were no more amenable to the French than they had been to Turkish rule.
As the French began to colonize Algeria’s coastal plains, the local tribes organized a resistance movement, beginning in the west of the country near Oran. The Arabs and Berbers turned to the charismatic leaders of their Sufi orders (mystical Muslim brotherhoods), which often combined religious legitimacy with a noble genealogy linking order members to the family of the Prophet Muhammad. The Sufi orders were organized into networks of lodges that spanned Algeria and commanded the loyalty of the leading men of the community. It was a natural framework within which to mount an opposition movement.
Among the most powerful Sufi communities in western Algeria was the Qadiriyya order. The head of the order was a wise old man named Muhi al-Din. Several of the leading tribes of the region petitioned Muhi al-Din to accept the title of sultan and lead the Arabs of western Algeria in a holy war against the French. When he refused, pleading age and infirmity, the tribes nominated his son Abd al-Qadir, who had already demonstrated courage in attacks on the French.
Abd al-Qadir (1808–1883) was acclaimed as amir, or leader of the tribes allied against French rule, in November 1832, at the age of twenty-four. It was the beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in the modern history of the Middle East. Over the next fifteen years, Abd al-Qadir united the people of Algeria in a sustained resistance movement against the French occupation of their country. It is no exaggeration to say he was a legend in his own lifetime—in the West and the Arab world alike.
To the French, Abd al-Qadir was the ultimate “noble Arab,” a Saladin figure whose religious convictions and personal integrity placed his motives—defending his country against foreign military occupation—beyond reproach. He was bold and audacious in battle, pursuing a guerrilla style of warfare that brought his small forces victories against French armies more advanced than those that had routed Egypt’s Mamluks. His exploits were captured in luscious oils by the Romantic artist Horace Vernet (1789–1863), the official recorder of the French conquest of Algeria. Victor Hugo eulogized Abd al-Qadir in verse as le beau soldat, le beau prêtre—literally, “the handsome soldier, the handsome priest.”
To his Arab followers, Abd al-Qadir enjoyed religious legitimacy as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (a sharif) and as the son of one of the most respected heads of a leading Sufi order. They vowed their loyalty to him and were rewarded with victories against superior forces. Abd al-Qadir’s exploits thrilled contemporaries across the Arab and Islamic world, as a “Commander of the Faithful” defending Muslim lands against foreign invaders.
Abd al-Qadir pursued a remarkably intelligent war. At one point, upon capturing some of his papers, the French were astonished to discover that he had obtained very reliable information on debates in the French Chamber of Deputies relating to the war in Algeria. He knew how unpopular the war was in French public opinion and was aware of the pressures on the government to come to terms with the Algerian insurgents.3 Armed with this intelligence, Abd al-Qadir pursued a war designed to drive the French to seek peace.
Twice he forced French generals to conclude peace treaties on his terms, granting recognition of his sovereignty and clear limits to the territory that would remain under French control. The first treaty was agreed to in February 1834 with General Louis Desmichels, and the second—the Tafna Treaty of mutual recognition—was concluded in May 1837 with General Robert Bugeaud. The latter treaty granted Abd al-Qadir sovereignty over two-thirds of the land mass of Algeria.4 Both treaties proved short-lived in the face of expansionist ambitions on both sides.
Abd al-Qadir and the French each sought to extend their authority over the eastern city of Constantine. The French argued that Constantine fell well outside the territories recognized in the 1837 treaty as part of Abd al-Qadir’s state. The Algerians retorted that the treaty set clear boundaries on French territory, which the French had violated in the conquest of Constantine. Once again, the French and Algerian positions were irreconcilable. Abd al-Qadir accused the French of breaking their word and resumed his war. On November 3, 1839, he wrote to the French governor-general:
We were at peace, and the limits between your country and ours were clearly determined. . . . [Now] you have published [the claim] that all of the lands between Algiers and Constantine should no longer receive orders from me. The rupture comes from you. However, so that you do not accuse me of betrayal, I warn you that I will resume the war. Prepare yourselves, warn your travellers, all who live in isolated places, in a word take every precaution as you see fit.5
Abd al-Qadir’s forces descended on the vulnerable French agricultural colonies in the Mitija Plain, located east of Algiers. Provoking widespread panic, they killed and wounded hundreds of settlers, putting their homes to the torch. The government in Paris was faced with a clear choice: withdraw, or commit to a complete occupation of Algeria. It opted for the latter and dispatched General Bugeaud at the head of a massive campaign force to achieve the final “submission” of the Algerian resistance to French rule.
Bugeaud faced a daunting task in his attempt to achieve total victory in Algeria. The Algerians were well organized and highly motivated. Abd al-Qadir had organized his government in Algeria into eight provinces, each headed by a governor whose administration reached down to the tribal level. These governors were paid regular salaries and were charged with maintaining law and order and collecting taxes for the state. Judges were appointed to enforce Islamic law. Government was unobtrusive, operating within the constraints of Islamic law, which encouraged farmers and tribesmen to pay their taxes.
The Algerian government raised enough funds from taxes to support a volunteer army that proved highly effective in the field. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, his forces numbered 8,000 regular infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 240 artillerymen with 20 cannons, spread equally across the eight governorates. These mobile forces were able to harass the French and withdraw from combat whenever French numbers threatened to overwhelm them in classic guerrilla war tactics.
Abd al-Qadir had also created a string of fortress towns along the ridge of the high plateau to provide his armies safe havens to escape French counterattacks. Speaking to his French captors in Toulon in 1848, Abd al-Qadir explained his strategy: “I was convinced, war having resumed, that I would be forced to abandon to you [i.e., the French] all of central inland towns, but that it would be impossible for you to reach the Sahara because the means of transport that encumbered your armies would prevent you from advancing so far.”6
The Algerian leader’s strategy was to draw the French into the interior, where the invaders would be overextended, isolated, and easier to defeat. Speaking with a French prisoner at the fortress town of Tagdemt, Abd al-Qadir warned: “You will die with disease in our mountains, and those whom sickness shall not carry off, my horsemen will send death with their bullets.”7 With both his government and his defenses better organized than ever, Abd al-Qadir was confident he would prevail once again over the French.
Abd al-Qadir did not anticipate, however, the extraordinary violence that the French would unleash on the Algerian people. General Bugeaud pursued a scorched-earth policy in the Algerian interior, designed to undermine popular support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance—burning villages, driving away cattle, destroying harvests, and uprooting orchards. Men, women, and children were killed, and officers were told to take no prisoners. Any of Abd al-Qadir’s men who tried to surrender were simply cut down. Tribes and villages began to turn against Abd al-Qadir to avoid suffering the fate of his supporters. The measures also devastated the rural economy, cutting Abd al-Qadir’s tax receipts.
The Algerians reeled under the French onslaught, and public support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance movement began to crumble. As the families of his soldiers came to fear attack by fellow Algerians, Abd al-Qadir brought all of their dependents—wives, children, and elderly folk—into a massive encampment called a zimala. By his own description, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala was a mobile city of no less than 60,000. To give some sense of the size of the zimala, he claimed that “when an Arab lost track of his family, it sometimes took him two days to find them [within the crowd].” The zimala served as a mobile support unit for Abd al-Qadir’s army, with armorers, saddle-makers, tailors, and all the workers needed for his organization.
Not surprisingly, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala became a prime target of the French forces, keen to strike a blow against his soldiers’ morale and the support base of the Algerian army. Through good intelligence on the position of the French army and knowledge of the terrain, Abd al-Qadir was able to keep the zimala safe for the first three years of the conflict. In May 1843, however, the location of the encampment was betrayed and the French army attacked the zimala. Abd al-Qadir and his men learned of the attack too late to intervene. “Had I been there,” he reflected to his French captors, “we would have fought for our wives and our children and would have shown you a great day, no doubt. But God did not want it; I only learned of this misfortune three days later. It was too late!”8
The French attack on the zimala had the desired effect. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, the French killed one-tenth of the population of the mobile encampment. The loss of their elders, wives, and children dealt a severe blow to his troops’ morale. The attack also dealt a severe material blow to Abd al-Qadir’s war effort, as he lost most of his property and the wealth of his treasury. It was the beginning of the end of his war against the French. Abd al-Qadir and his forces went on the retreat, and in November 1843, the Algerian commander led his followers into exile in Morocco.
Over the next four years, Abd al-Qadir rallied his troops to attack the French in Algeria, falling back to Moroccan territory to elude capture. The sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd al-Rahman, had no wish to be drawn into the Algerian conflict. However, for harboring their enemy, the French attacked the Moroccan town of Oujda near the Algerian border and sent their navy to shell the ports of Tangiers and Mo-gadir. In September 1844, the French and Moroccan governments signed a treaty to restore friendly relations, which explicitly declared Abd al-Qadir outlawed throughout the empire of Morocco.9 Denied a safe haven and cut off from his resource base, Abd al-Qadir found it ever harder to fight the French, and in December 1847, he surrendered his sword to the French.
France celebrated the defeat of Abd al-Qadir as a triumph over a major adversary. One of the Algerian leader’s biographers (and admirers) reflected ironically: “The mind boggles when we think that it took seven years of combat and 100,000 men of the greatest army in the world to destroy that which the emir [prince] built in two years and five months.”10 The impact of the war on the people of Algeria was devastating. Estimates of Algerian civilian casualties number in the hundreds of thousands.
The French transported Abd al-Qadir back to France where he was imprisoned with his family. Abd al-Qadir was something of a celebrity, and the government of King Louis Philippe wanted to benefit from its prisoner’s popularity to bestow a high-profile pardon on him. These plans were disrupted by the 1848 Revolution and Louis Philippe’s overthrow. The Algerian leader was forgotten in the political turmoil of regime change in Paris. It was not until 1852 that the new president, Louis Napoleon (later crowned Emperor Napoleon III), restored Abd al-Qadir’s freedom. The Algerian leader was invited as Louis Napoleon’s guest of honor to tour Paris on a white charger and review the French troops with the president. Though he was never allowed to return to Algeria, the French gave him a pension for life and a steamship to take him to the place of exile of his choice. Abd al-Qadir set sail for Ottoman domains and settled in Damascus, where he was given a hero’s welcome. He and his family were accepted into the circle of elite families of Damascus, where he was to play an important role in communal politics. In later life Abd al-Qadir dedicated himself to a life of scholarship and Islamic mysticism. He died in Damascus in 1883.
Victory over Abd al-Qadir was only the beginning of the French conquest of Algeria. Over the next decades France continued to extend its colonial sovereignty southward. By 1847, nearly 110,000 Europeans had settled in Algeria. The next year, the settler community won the right to elect deputies to the French parliament. In 1870, with nearly 250,000 French settlers, Algeria was formally annexed to France, its non-European residents made subjects (not citizens) of the French state. Aside from the Zionist colonization of Palestine, there was to be no settler-colonialism in all the Middle East to match what the French achieved in Algeria.
With the exception of France’s violent imperial war in Algeria, the European powers abided by their commitment to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire from the 1840 London Convention for the Pacification of the Levant to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. The formal colonization of North Africa resumed in 1881 with the French occupation of Tunisia.
Much had changed between 1840 and 1881—in Europe and the Ottoman Empire alike—as a powerful new idea from Europe took root: nationalism. A product of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, nationalism spread across Europe at a variable rate during the nineteenth century. Greece was an early convert, achieving its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830 after a decade of war. Other European states, such as Germany and Italy, took shape over decades due to nationalist-inspired unification movements, and only emerged into the community of nations in their modern form in the early 1870s. The Austro-Hungarian Empire began to face growing nationalist challenges from within, and it was only a matter of time until the Ottoman Empire’s territories in Eastern Europe followed suit.
The Balkan nations—Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Macedonia—began to seek their independence from the Ottomans in the 1830s. The European powers grew increasingly supportive of Ottoman Christians seeking to free themselves from the Turkish “yoke.” Politicians in Britain and France tabled motions in support of Balkan nationalist movements. The Russian government gave full support to Orthodox Christians and fellow Slavs across the Balkans. The Austrians hoped to benefit from secessionist movements in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro to extend their territory at the Ottomans’ expense (and in the process integrated the very nationalist movements that by 1914 would lead to their downfall and set off a world war).
This outside support emboldened Balkan nationalists in their struggle with the Ottoman state. A major revolt broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1875. The following year, Bulgarian nationalists launched an uprising against the Ottomans. The Bulgarian conflict ravaged the countryside, as Christian and Muslim villages were caught up in the violence between nationalist fighters and Ottoman soldiers. The European newspapers, overlooking the higher casualty figures among Bulgarian Muslims, trumpeted the massacre of Christians as the “Bulgarian horrors.” With the Ottomans pinned down by conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria, Prince Milan of Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in July 1876, and Russia followed suit in support of the Slavic peoples of the Balkans.
Ordinarily, Britain would have intervened at this point. Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had long advocated support for the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russian ambitions in Continental Europe. However, Disraeli found his hands tied by public opinion. The violence—and the press coverage of the atrocities—discredited his Turcophile policies and left Disraeli vulnerable to the barbs of his Liberal opponent, William Gladstone. In 1876 Gladstone published an influential pamphlet entitled The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Gladstone’s eloquent tirade condemned the Turks as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity.” His pamphlet advocated the expulsion of the Ottomans from their European provinces altogether. “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses,” he wrote, “in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.” Gladstone was more in tune with public opinion that Disraeli, and the British government was forced to abandon its support of Ottoman territorial integrity.
Once the principle of Turkish sovereignty over its provinces was breached, the European powers began to consider the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman efforts at reform had not produced a stable or viable state, its European critics argued. They pointed to the Ottoman bankruptcy of 1875 as further evidence that Turkey was the “Sick Man of Europe.” Better to agree a redistribution of Ottoman lands between the European Powers. Germany proposed the partition of the Ottoman Empire, dividing the Balkans between Austria and Russia, giving Syria to France, and awarding Egypt and key Mediterranean islands to Britain. Aghast, the British quickly proposed an international conference in Istanbul in November 1876, to resolve the Balkan crises and the Russo-Turkish conflict.
Diplomacy bought time, but the belligerent powers were bent on war and the volatile situation provided ample opportunities. Russia declared war again in April 1877 and proceeded to invade the Ottoman Empire from the east and the west simultaneously. Moving quickly into Eastern Anatolia and through the Balkans, the Russians inflicted heavy casualties on the Ottoman defenders. By early 1878 Ottoman defenses crumbled as Russian forces swept through Bulgaria and Thrace and pressed on to Istanbul itself, forcing an unconditional Ottoman surrender to prevent the occupation of their capital city.
Having suffered a total defeat to Russia, the Ottomans had little say over the terms imposed on them by the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The longstanding imperative of preserving the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire was abandoned as the European powers embarked on the first partition of Ottoman territory. In the course of the Berlin peace conference, Bulgaria received autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, whereas Bosnia and Herzegovina, though nominally still Ottoman territory, passed under Austrian occupation. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro gained outright independence. Russia gained extensive territories in Eastern Anatolia. By these measures the Ottoman Empire was forced to surrender two-fifths of its territory and one-fifth its population (half of them Muslim).11
Unable to prevent the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the British were intent on securing their own strategic interests in Ottoman domains before the Congress of Berlin even began. As a maritime power, Britain had long sought a naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean, from which it could oversee the smooth flow of navigation through the Suez Canal. The island of Cyprus would serve this purpose nicely. The beleaguered Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) needed an ally more than he needed the island, and so he concluded a treaty of defensive alliance with Britain in exchange for Cyprus on the eve of the Congress of Berlin.
It was the British claim to Cyprus that extended the partition of Ottoman domains from the Balkans to North Africa. Germany gave its consent to Britain’s acquisition of Cyprus, though both the British and Germans recognized the need to compensate France to restore the balance of power in the Mediterranean. They agreed to “offer” Tunisia to France to consolidate its empire in North Africa and secure its borders with Algeria. Germany, which had annexed the French province of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, was only too happy to give its consent to this gift in the hope of fostering a rapprochement with Paris. Only Italy, with its large settler population and significant investments in Tunisia, raised objections—which the other powers were pleased to overlook, suggesting that Italy might instead take satisfaction in Libya (which, in 1911, it did).
The French had permission to occupy Tunisia but had no grounds to justify a hostile act against the compliant North African state. Since its bankruptcy in 1869, the Tunisian government had cooperated fully with French financial advisors in honoring its external debts. The French government first proposed the establishment of a protectorate over Tunisia in 1879, but its ruler, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey (r. 1859–1882), politely declined to deliver his country to foreign imperial rule.
To make matters more difficult, French public opinion had turned against colonial ventures. A majority believed that Algeria had come at too high a price to France, and there was little support for extending the French presence in North Africa. Without public support at home or a pretext from abroad, the French government was stymied in its efforts to add Tunisia to its North African empire. Meanwhile, Italy took advantage of every French delay to extend its own presence in Tunisia, where the Italian settler community significantly outweighed the French. It was this Franco-Italian rivalry that ultimately drove the French to action.
The French had to find grounds to justify invading Tunisia. In 1880 a French adventurer defaulted on a concession and was expelled by the Tunisians for his pains. The French consul protested, presenting the bey with an ultimatum demanding compensation for the Frenchman and the punishment of the Tunisian officials responsible for the insolvent Frenchman’s expulsion. It wasn’t an insult on a par with the 1827 “fly-whisk” incident in Algeria, but it was deemed sufficient mistreatment of a French national to warrant the mobilization of an invasion force to redeem national honor. The unreasonably reasonable ruler of Tunisia deprived the French of a pretext for invasion by conceding to all of their outrageous demands. The troops were sent back to their barracks to await a more propitious opportunity to invade Tunisia.
French troops were mustered again in March 1881 when a group of tribesmen were alleged to have crossed into Algeria from Tunisia on a raid. Though the bey offered to pay compensation for damages and to punish the tribesmen, the French insisted on taking action themselves. A French cavalry detachment crossed the Tunisian border and, bypassing the territory of the guilty tribe, made straight for Tunis. It met up with a seaborne invasion force in the Tunisian capital in April 1881. Faced with French invasion forces by land and sea, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey signed a treaty with the French on May 12, 1881, that effectively severed his ties to the Ottoman Empire and ceded his sovereignty to France. Tunisia’s experience of reform and bankruptcy had led the country from informal European control to outright imperial domination.
While the French were occupied with integrating Tunisia into their North African empire, trouble was brewing to the east in Egypt. As was noted in the previous chapter, reform and bankruptcy in Egypt had led to European intervention in its finances and governance. Rather than restore stability, the measures undertaken by the European powers had so destabilized Egypt’s internal politics that a powerful opposition movement had emerged to threaten the khedive’s rule. What began as concerted action between Britain and France to reinforce the khedive’s authority ended in Britain’s accidental occupation of Egypt in 1882.
Egypt’s new khedive, Tawfiq Pasha (r. 1879–1892), was caught between the demands of Europe and powerful interest groups within his own society. He came to the vice-regal throne suddenly, when Britain and France prevailed upon the Ottoman sultan to depose his predecessor (and father), Khedive Ismail, for obstructing the work of their financial controllers in Egypt. Tawfiq Pasha thus knew better than to cross the European powers. Yet compliance with British and French demands had exposed him to growing criticism within Egypt. Large landholders and urban elites, chafing under the economic austerity measures imposed to repay Egypt’s foreign debts, grew increasingly outspoken against the khedive’s misrule.
The Egyptian elites enjoyed a political platform in the Assembly of Delegates, the early Egyptian parliament established by Ismail Pasha in 1866. Their representatives in the Assembly began to demand a role in approving the Egyptian budget, increased ministerial responsibility to the Assembly, and a liberal constitution constraining the powers of the khedive. Tawfiq Pasha had neither the power nor the inclination to concede to such demands and, with the support of the European powers, suspended the Assembly in 1879. The landed elites responded by throwing their support behind a growing opposition movement in the Egyptian army.
Egypt’s army had been hard hit by the austerity measures imposed after the country’s bankruptcy—particularly the Egyptians in the army. There was a deep divide in the army between the Turkish-speaking elite in the officer corps and the Arabic-speaking native-born Egyptians. The Turkish-speaking officers, known as Turco-Circassians, traced their origins to the Mamluks as a martial class. They had strong ties to the khedive’s household and to the Ottoman society of Istanbul. They held native-born Egyptians in low regard and spoke of them dismissively as peasant soldiers. When Egypt’s financial controllers decreed sharp cut-backs in the size of the Egyptian army, the Turco-Circassian commanders protected their own and imposed the cuts onto native-born Egyptian ranks. Egyptian officers rallied to their men’s cause and began to mobilize against unfair dismissal. They were led by one of the highest-ranking Egyptian officers, Colonel Ahmad Urabi.
Ahmad Urabi (1841–1911) was one of the first native-born Egyptians to enter the officer corps. Born in a village of the eastern Nile Delta, Urabi left his studies at the mosque university of al-Azhar in 1854 to enter the new military academy opened by Said Pasha. Urabi believed himself no less qualified to be an officer than any Turco-Circassian of his generation. He claimed descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad on both his mother’s and his father’s side—in Islamic terms, a very illustrious lineage that no Mamluk could match, given their origins as Caucasian Christians converted to Islam as military slaves. A man of talent and ambition, Urabi achieved distinction, and his place in the history books, as a rebel, not as a soldier. Indeed, the revolt that bears his name was the event that precipitated the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.
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.”12 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.”13
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.”14
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.”15
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.16 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.17
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.”18
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.19 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.”20
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.
In January 1882, the British and French governments drafted a joint communiqué, known as the Gambetta Note, in a bid to restore the khedive’s authority. One might have expected better from two states that prided themselves on their mastery of diplomacy. The British and French hoped, by giving assurances of “their united efforts” against all internal or external threats to order in Egypt, that they might “avert the dangers to which the Government of the Khedive might be exposed, and which would certainly find England and France united to oppose them.” Nothing could have weakened Tawfiq Pasha’s position more than this poorly-veiled threat to protect the khedive from his own people.
The clumsy Gambetta Note was followed by European demands that Urabi be dismissed from the cabinet. Urabi’s domestic standing was greatly reinforced when the unpopular European Powers sought to bring him down. Tawfiq, in comparison, became even more isolated. Urabi accused Tawfiq Pasha of acting on behalf of European interests and of betraying his own country. The prime minister resigned with most of his cabinet. Under the circumstances, no one was willing to form a new government. Urabi remained in office, which meant that the government was effectively under the control of its most popular and powerful minister. In seeking Urabi’s dismissal, the European powers had unwittingly left him in control of the Egyptian government.
As the situation escalated, Britain and France resorted to gunboat diplomacy; in May 1882, the two powers dispatched a joint naval squadron to Egypt. This show of force left Khedive Tawfiq’s position untenable. On May 31 he left Cairo for Ras al-Tin Palace in Alexandria to be closer to the protection of the British and French ships. Egypt was essentially being ruled by two men: the legally recognized head of state, Khedive Tawfiq, confined to his palace in Alexandria; and the popular leader, Ahmad Urabi, at the head of the acting government in Cairo.
With European warships cruising off the coast, tensions between Egyptians and Europeans exploded into violence in Alexandria on June 11, 1882. What began as a street fight between a British subject and an Egyptian coach driver turned into a riot against foreigners that claimed over fifty lives. Hundreds more were wounded, and thousands were left destitute by the destruction of homes and work places. The European press played up the Alexandria riots as a massacre of Christians and Europeans, putting pressure on the British and French governments to respond forcefully to the breakdown in order in Egypt.
Urabi knew that anti-European riots were likely to provoke the British and French to intervene. He even suspected Khedive Tawfiq of instigating the riots to precipitate foreign intervention, though there is no evidence to support this allegation. Urabi dispatched 12,000 troops to Alexandria to restore order—and to reinforce the city against the expected European response. Urabi placed Egypt on a war footing, turning to his supporters among the large landholders to ask for peasant recruits to bolster his armed forces. Emergency taxes were levied to provide Urabi’s government with financial resources to withstand a European attack.
Sure enough, the commander of the British fleet, Sir Beauchamp Seymour, issued a series of escalating ultimatums, threatening to bombard Alexandria unless the city’s sea defenses were dismantled. Undaunted, the Egyptian army set about reinforcing the defenses of Alexandria, extending the ramparts on the waterfront and building gun emplacements to face the threat of European ships. With neither the Europeans nor the Egyptians willing to back down, armed conflict was imminent.
The threat of military action had one unforeseen consequence: the withdrawal of the French fleet after months of concerted Anglo-French efforts. The French government was bound by its constitution to obtain the consent of parliament before entering into hostilities with any country. France was still recovering from its terrible defeat to Germany in 1870, the cost of subduing Algeria in 1871, and the expenses associated with the occupation of Tunisia in 1881. The French treasury was overextended, and the Chamber was unwilling to enter into any new foreign entanglements. On July 5 the French government explained its position to the British and withdrew its ships from Alexandria.
Now the British faced a momentous decision: either back down or go it alone. Britain did not want to occupy Egypt. A bankrupt state with a discredited ruler and an army in revolt is not an attractive proposition to any imperial power. Moreover, Britain’s presence in Egypt would upset the balance of power in Europe that Whitehall had worked so long to preserve. Even more problematic was the exit strategy: once British troops had entered Egypt, when would they be in a position to withdraw? Given Britain’s objectives of assuring the security of the Suez Canal and repayment of Egypt’s debts to British creditors, the risks of military action seemed to outweigh the benefits.
Backing down, however, was never really an option. Victorian Britain would not have considered itself “Great” had it conceded to rebellious officers in less-developed countries. Admiral Seymour was given the government’s approval, and on July 11 he opened fire on the ramparts and city of Alexandria. By sunset the city was ablaze, and the Egyptian forces were in retreat. A detachment of British soldiers occupied Alexandria on July 14. It was the beginning not just of a war but of a British occupation that would last three-quarters of a century.
Between June and September 1882, Ahmad Urabi served both as head of an insurrectionary government and commander in chief of Egypt’s defenses against the British. Urabi enjoyed widespread support in both the cities and countryside for standing up to foreign invaders. While the khedive remained confined to his palace in Alexandria, many of the princes, attendants, and women of the royal household threw their support behind Urabi and contributed money, grain, and horses for the war effort.21 He continued to enjoy the full support of the landed elites and the urban merchants, as well as of the religious establishment. Urabi’s partisans did all they could to support the coming war, but the professional army was neither large nor confident enough to take on the British, and the peasant volunteers lacked the discipline and training to hold their ground under fire. Even as Urabi’s numbers swelled, his chances remained slim.
The British were surprised by the stiff resistance they encountered from Urabi’s irregular army. Sir Garnet Wolseley reached Alexandria at the height of summer at the head of a 20,000-man campaign force. He marched his troops from Alexandria to seize Cairo, but his progress was checked by Urabi’s Egyptian defenders for five weeks, forcing the British to abandon the effort. Wolseley returned to Alexandria to ship his men to the Suez Canal zone, which the British were able to secure with extensive naval power in early September 1882. While in the canal zone, Wolseley received reinforcements from British India, after which he prepared to march westward toward Cairo. Urabi managed to surprise the British forces before they departed the zone and inflicted heavy casualties on the invaders before withdrawing in the face of superior numbers. The Egyptian forces fell back to a spot in the Eastern Desert halfway between the canal and the delta called Tall al-Kabir, to protect Cairo from invasion. Wolseley’s forces attacked before the Egyptians had the time to lay down proper defenses. The British marched to within 300 yards of Egyptian lines in the predawn hours and surprised the defenders with a bayonet charge at sunrise on September 13. The battle was over within one hour as the exhausted Egyptian troops finally succumbed to superior British forces. The road to Cairo now lay clear before the invading forces.
The insurrectionary government of Ahmad Urabi collapsed with the Egyptian defenses at Tall al-Kabir. Urabi was captured in Cairo two days later. He and his colleagues were tried on charges of treason, found guilty, and had their death sentences commuted to a life in exile on the British colony of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). Khedive Tawfiq was restored to his throne, though he never recovered full sovereignty. With British troops occupying the country and British advisors posted to all levels of government, the real ruler of Egypt was the British Resident, Sir Evelyn Baring (later elevated to the peerage as Lord Cromer).
Urabi left behind a mixed legacy. Following the collapse of his movement, many criticized him for having provoked the British occupation of Egypt. Yet there is no denying the broad-based support he had enjoyed when standing up for the rights of native-born Egyptians. Some of his most outspoken supporters were women of the royal household. Urabi’s lawyer, A. M. Broadley, recorded a conversation with one princess who enthused that they all “secretly sympathised from the first with Arabi [sic], because we knew he sought only the good of the Egyptians.... We saw in Arabi a deliverer, and our enthusiasm for him knew no bounds.”22 Princess Nazli, one of Muhammad ’Ali’s granddaughters, explained Urabi’s appeal in more universal terms:
Arabi was the first Egyptian Minister who made the Europeans obey him. In his time at least the Mohammedans held up their heads, and the Greeks and Italians did not dare transgress the law. . . . Now there is nobody to keep order. The Egyptians alone are kept under by the police, and the Europeans do as they like.23
Urabi spent eighteen years in exile before being allowed to return to his native land by Tawfiq’s successor, Khedive Abbas II (r. 1892–1914), in 1901. Granted a formal pardon by the Egyptian government, he pledged his loyalty to the khedive and forsook all political activity. A new generation of young nationalists hoped to gain his support for their fight against the British occupation, but Urabi kept his promise and stayed out of politics. An elderly man, Urabi wanted to see out his days in his beloved Egypt. His eyes were firmly fixed on the past, not the future. He spent the last decade of his life reading all of the books and newspaper accounts on the Urabi Revolt and dedicated his remaining years to clearing his name of all accusations of wrongdoing.24 He wrote a number of autobiographical essays and circulated them widely to authors in Egypt and abroad.
In spite of his efforts, two charges stained Urabi’s name for decades after his death in 1911: responsibility for provoking the British occupation of Egypt, and treason against the dynasty of Muhammad ‘Ali, the legitimate rulers of Egypt. It was only after a new generation of young Egyptian colonels overthrew the last of Muhammad’Ali’s line in the 1952 revolution that Urabi was rehabilitated and was admitted to the pantheon of Egyptian national heroes.
The British occupation provoked upheaval well beyond the frontiers of Egypt. French dismay turned to hostility as they saw their British rivals establish an enduring imperial presence in Egypt, which since Napoleonic times had been an important French client state. The Egyptians had drawn upon French military advisors, sent their largest educational delegations to Paris, and imported French industrial technology; in addition, the Suez Canal was established as a French company. France refused to be reconciled to the loss of Egypt and sought by all means to settle scores with “perfidious Albion.” The French took their revenge by securing strategic territories in Africa, both to restore their imperial glory and to put pressure on British overseas interests. What ensued came to be known as the “scramble for Africa,” as Britain and France, followed closely by Portugal, Germany, and Italy, painted the map of Africa in their imperial colors.
Between 1882 and 1904, colonial rivalries led to a deep antagonism between Britain and France. The nadir of this competition came in 1898, when the two imperial powers very nearly went to war over rival claims to an isolated stretch of the Nile in Sudan. Neither side could allow the antagonism to fester and threaten open conflict. The only solution was to restore the imperial balance of power in the Mediterranean by conceding territory to France to compensate for Britain’s position in Egypt. Given France’s holdings in Tunisia and Algeria, the obvious solution lay in Morocco.25
The problem was that France wasn’t the only European power with interests in Morocco. The Spanish held colonies on the Mediterranean coast, the British enjoyed significant trade interests, and the Germans were proving increasingly assertive in their own right. There was also the consideration that, after centuries of independent statehood, the Moroccans neither sought nor provoked invasion. The French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, set out his strategy in 1902, saying that he was interested “in distinguishing the international question from the French-Moroccan question, and to settle the former separately and successively with each power in order ultimately to enjoy full freedom to settle [with Morocco].”26 Over the next ten years, France haggled with each of the European powers in turn before imposing its rule on Morocco.
The power with the least interest in Morocco was Italy, so Delcassé turned to Rome first, striking a deal in 1902 that recognized Italian interest in Libya in return for Italy’s support of French ambitions in Morocco.
Britain was to prove more of a challenge. The British wished to preserve their commercial interests in Morocco and were unwilling to allow any maritime power to challenge the Royal Navy’s domination of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, Britain had a genuine interest in settling its colonial differences with France. In April 1904, Britain and France came to an agreement—the Entente Cordiale—that served as a fresh start for their diplomatic relations. According to the terms of the agreement, France recognized Britain’s position in Egypt and would not ask “that a limit of time be fixed for the British occupation.” Britain, for its part, recognized France’s strategic position “as a Power whose dominions are conterminous for a great distance with those of Morocco” and pledged not to obstruct French actions “to preserve order in that country, and to provide assistance for the purpose of all administrative, economic, financial, and military reforms which it may require.”27
France moved swiftly to secure Spain’s agreement to a future French occupation of Morocco. The French satisfied both British and Spanish concerns by conceding Morocco’s Mediterranean coastline to Spain’s sphere of influence. This provided the basis for a Franco-Spanish agreement on Morocco, concluded in October 1904. The French had very nearly solved the “international question,” paving the way to colonizing Morocco. All the European powers had now given their consent—except Germany. Delcassé had hoped to move on Morocco without involving Germany. After all, the German Empire had never extended to the Mediterranean. Moreover, Delcassé knew that Germany would demand French recognition of their annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, seized in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, in return for German recognition of France’s ambitions in Morocco. This was more than France was willing to give for Germany’s consent. However, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II refused to be bypassed. Germany was emerging as an imperial power in its own right, with possessions in Africa and the South Pacific, and Morocco proved a point of competition between Germany and France.
The Germans began to assert their interests in Morocco to force France to the negotiating table. In March 1905 the German foreign minister, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, arranged for Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit the Moroccan sultan, Moulay Abd al-Aziz, in Tangier. Throughout his visit, the German emperor upheld respect for both Moroccan sovereignty and German interests in the sultan’s domains, thereby raising the first obstacle to French ambitions in Morocco. The German demarche forced the French into negotiations with Germany, and the “Moroccan question” was reopened with the convening of the Algeciras Conference in January 1906.
The conference, in which eleven countries took part, was ostensibly aimed at helping the Moroccan sultan establish a reform program for his government. In reality, France hoped to use the meeting to bring broader European support to bear on Germany to overcome the kaiser’s resistance to French ambitions in Morocco. Despite Germany’s best efforts to turn the conference attendees against France, three of the states taking part—Italy, Britain, and Spain—had already given their consent to France’s claims to Morocco, and the kaiser’s government was forced to give ground. In 1909 Germany finally recognized France’s special role in Morocco’s security.
Having secured the consent of the other European powers to colonize Morocco, the French shifted their focus to French-Moroccan relations. The sharifs of Morocco had ruled independently of both the Ottoman Empire and the states of Europe in an uninterrupted line since 1511. From 1860 onward, however, the European powers increasingly interfered with the politics and economy of the ancient sultanate. Morocco had also undergone a series of state-led reforms during the reign of Moulay Hasan (r. 1873–1894), in a now-familiar bid to check European penetration by adopting European technology and ideas. Predictably, the results were greater European penetration and a weakening of the national treasury through expensive military and infrastructural projects.
The reforming sultan, Moulay Hasan, was succeeded by the fourteen-year-old Moulay Abd al-Aziz (r. 1894–1908), who lacked the maturity and experience to steer Morocco through rival European ambitions to preserve its sovereignty and independence. France was now actively exploiting the ill-defined boundary between Algeria and Morocco to send soldiers into Moroccan territory on the pretext of halting tribal incursions. While encroaching on the territory of Morocco, the French entangled the sultan’s government in public loans. In 1904 the French government negotiated a 62.5 million francs loan ($12.5 million) from Parisian banks, furthering France’s economic penetration of Morocco.
Moroccans resented the expanding French presence in their country, and they began to attack foreign commercial ventures. The French retaliated by occupying Moroccan towns—most notoriously, Casablanca was bombarded from the sea and occupied by 5,000 troops in 1907 after a violent attack on a French-owned factory. As the French encroached deeper into Morocco, the people began to lose confidence in their sultan. His own brother, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, launched a rebellion against him, forcing him to abdicate and seek French protection in 1908.
Following his successful rebellion, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz (r. 1907–1912) succeeded his brother to the throne. However, Abd al-Hafiz was no more effective at staving off European encroachment than his brother had been. The sultan’s last ally in Europe was Germany, which sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir in July 1911 in a last bid to halt French expansion in Morocco. But the Agadir crisis was ultimately resolved at Morocco’s expense. In return for France’s agreement to cede territory in the French Congo to Germany, the kaiser’s government acquiesced to French ambitions in Morocco.
The French occupation of Morocco was completed in March 1912, when Moulay Abd al-Hafiz signed the Fez Convention establishing a French protectorate over Morocco. Though the sharifs remained on the throne—indeed, the current king, Mohammad VI, is their lineal descendant—formal control over Morocco devolved to the French Empire for the next forty-four years. And France could finally forgive Britain for its occupation of Egypt.
Libya was the last territory in North Africa still under direct Ottoman rule, and by the time France had secured its protectorate over Morocco, Italy was already at war with the Ottoman Empire for its possession. While nominally part of the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, the two Libyan provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica had been under direct Ottoman control only since the 1840s—and the Porte ruled Libya with a very light touch. The two provincial capitals, Tripoli and Benghazi, were garrison towns in which the Ottoman presence was limited to a handful of officials and the soldiers needed to keep the peace.
After the French occupation of Tunisia and the British occupation of Egypt, however, the Ottomans placed growing strategic value on their Libyan provinces. Following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which brought a new group of nationalists to power in the Ottoman Empire, the government in Istanbul began to take active measures to limit Italian encroachment in Libya, blocking Italians from buying land or owning factories in Tripoli and Cyrenaica. The Ottomans sought by all means to avoid losing their last grip on North Africa to European imperial ambition.
For decades, the other European powers had been promising Libya to Italy—the British in 1878, the Germans in 1888, and the French in 1902. Clearly the other European states expected Italy to find a peaceful means of adding Libya to its possessions. Instead, the Italians chose to enter Libya with all guns blazing. They declared war on the Ottomans on September 29, 1911, on the pretext of alleged abuse of Italian subjects in the Libyan provinces. The Ottomans in Libya mounted a stiff resistance to the invaders, so the Italians decided to take their war to the Ottoman heartlands. Italian ships bombarded Beirut in February 1912, attacked Ottoman positions in the Straits of the Dardanelles in April, and occupied Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in April–May 1912, wreaking havoc with the strategic balance in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The other European powers leaped into diplomatic action to contain the damage, fearing the Italians might set off a war in the volatile Balkans (indeed, they had been fanning the flames of the Albanian nationalist movement against the Ottomans). Italy was only too willing to allow the European conference system to settle the Libyan question. Its troops had been tied down by intense resistance from both the small Turkish garrisons and the local population in Libya and had not extended their control from the coastline to the inland regions.
Peace was restored at the price of the Ottomans’ final North African territory. The European states served as mediators between the Ottomans and Italians, and a formal peace treaty was concluded in October 1912, conceding Libya to Italian imperial rule. Yet even after the Ottoman troops withdrew, the Italians faced sustained resistance from the Libyans themselves, who continued their fight against foreign rule into the 1930s.
By the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties. European rules came to replace Ottoman rules, with significant consequences for the societies of North Africa. So much of imperial history is written from the perspective of high politics and international diplomacy. Yet for the people of North Africa, imperialism changed their lives in very important ways. One person’s experiences can shed light on what these changes meant for his society at large.
The intellectual Ahmad Amin (1886–1954) was born in Cairo four years after the British began their occupation of Egypt and died two years before the British withdrew. Colonial Egypt was all he ever knew. In the course of his education at al-Azhar and his early career as a school teacher, Ahmad Amin encountered many of the leading intellectual figures of his age. He met some of the most influential Islamic reformers of the day and witnessed the emergence of nationalist movements and political parties in Egypt. He saw the women of Egypt emerge from seclusion of veils and harems to enter public life. And he reflected on these tumultuous changes in his autobiography, written at the end of a successful life as a university professor and literary figure.28
Young Ahmad grew up in a rapidly changing world, and the generation gap separating him from his father, an Islamic scholar, was striking. His father, who passed between the academic life of al-Azhar and the demands of leading prayers in Imam al-Shafi’i mosque, lived in an age of Islamic certainties. Ahmad’s generation was shaped by new ideas and innovations, including newspapers, for which journalists played a key role in shaping public opinion.
Ahmad Amin began reading newspapers as a young school teacher, frequenting a café that provided newspapers for its clientele. As Amin explained, each newspaper was known for its political orientation. Amin usually chose a conservative, Islamic-oriented paper in keeping with his own personal values, though he was familiar with both the nationalist and the pro-imperialist papers of his day.
Introduced to Egypt in the 1820s, printing presses were among the first industrial goods imported into the Middle East. Muhammad ‘Ali sent one of his earliest technical missions to Milan, Italy, to acquire both the knowledge and technology of printing presses. Soon after, the Egyptian government began to publish an official gazette, which was the first periodical published in Arabic. Its primary objective was “to improve the performance of the honourable governors and other distinguished officials in charge of [public] affairs and interests.”29 Between 1842 and 1850, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, author of the celebrated study of Paris, served as editor of this official newspaper, the Arabic title of which meant “Egyptian Events.”
It took several decades before private entrepreneurs began to launch newspapers, though many of these papers came under indirect government control. Print runs were too small for newspapers to be viable without government support. One of the first Arabic newspapers, al-Jawa’ib, was published privately in Istanbul starting in 1861, until it ran into financial difficulties several months later. Sultan Abdul Aziz took the fledgling paper under his wing. “It has been decreed,” the publisher informed his readers, “that the expenses of al-Jawa’ib from now on be covered by the [Ottoman] Ministry of Finance and that it be printed at the imperial press. Under these circumstances, we must pledge loyalty to our master, the great Sultan.”30 These constraints on press freedoms notwithstanding, al-Jawa’ib was remarkably influential, reaching an Arabic-reading audience from Morocco to East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Other papers were soon to follow.
Beirut and Cairo emerged as the two main centers for journalism and publishing in the Arab world, and they remain so today. Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century was in the midst of a major literary revival, known in Arabic as the nahda, or “renaissance.” Muslim and Christian intellectuals, encouraged by the power of the (often missionary-owned) printing press, were actively engaged in writing dictionaries and encyclopedias and publishing editions of the great classics of Arabic literature and thought.
The nahda was an exciting moment of intellectual rediscovery and of cultural definition, as the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire began to relate to the glories of their pre-Ottoman past. The movement embraced all Arabic-speaking peoples without distinction by sect or region and planted the seed of an idea that would prove hugely influential in Arab politics: that the Arabs were a nation, defined by a common language, culture, and history. In the aftermath of the violent conflicts of 1860 in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, this positive new vision was particularly important in healing deep communal divides. Newspapers played a key role in diffusing these ideas. One of the leading luminaries of the nahda, Butrus al-Bustani, declared in 1859 that newspapers were “among the most important vehicles in educating the public.”31 By the end of the 1870s, Beirut boasted no fewer than twenty-five newspapers and current affairs periodicals.
By the end of the 1870s, however, the Ottoman government had begun to exert new controls on the press, which developed into strict censorship during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). Many journalists and intellectuals moved from Syria and Lebanon to Egypt, where the khedive exercised far fewer constraints on the press. This migration marked the beginnings of the private press in Cairo and Alexandria. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, over 160 Arabic-language newspapers and journals were established in Egypt.32 One of the most famous papers in the Arab world today, Al-Ahram (literally, “the pyramids”), was founded by two brothers, Salim and Bishara Taqla, who moved from Beirut to Alexandria in the early 1870s. Unlike many of the contemporary papers that provided essays on cultural and scientific subjects, Al-Ahram was, from its first issue of August 5, 1876, a true news paper. The Taqlas took advantage of Alexandria’s telegraph office to subscribe to the Reuters news wire service. Whereas the Beirut press, which had no access to the telegraph and was still reliant on the post, ran foreign stories months after the fact,Al-Ahram provided news from home and abroad within days, even hours, of the event.
As the Egyptian press grew more influential, the khedives sought to expand state control over the burgeoning media. The Egyptian government closed down those papers whose political views were deemed “excessive.” Following the Egyptian bankruptcy in 1876 and the ensuing European encroachment into Egypt’s political affairs, journalists were active in the coalition of reformers who threw their support behind Colonel Ahmad Urabi. The government responded by imposing a strict press law in 1881, setting a dangerous precedent of constraints on press freedoms.
The press restrictions were eased under British occupation, and by the mid-1890s, Lord Cromer no longer invoked the press law of 1881 at all. He continued to provide subventions for those newspapers most sympathetic to the British in Egypt—the English-language Egyptian Gazette and the Arabic Al-Muqattam—but took no action against papers that were openly critical of his administration. Cromer recognized that newspapers circulated among a very small circle of the literate elite, and that a free press was a useful pressure valve to allow the emerging nationalist movement to vent steam.
This was the world of newspaper publishing that Ahmad Amin encountered in the early 1900s: an Arab media that emerged from European technology to express the widest range of views, from pietism to nationalism and anti-imperialism.
The nationalism expressed in the newspapers of Ahmad Amin’s day was a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of “the Nation” as a political unit—a community based in a specific territory with the aspiration of self-governance—was the product of European Enlightenment thought that took root in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, in the course of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, many in the Arab world had frowned on nationalism when it was associated with Christian communities in the Balkans seeking to secede from the Ottoman Empire, usually with European support. Egyptian and North African soldiers had answered the sultan’s call and fought in wars against Balkan nationalist movements from the 1820s through the 1870s.
However, once North Africa was removed from the Ottoman world, with the advent of European colonial rule, nationalism emerged as an alternative to foreign domination. Indeed, imperialism provided two important ingredients for nationalism to emerge in North Africa: frontiers that defined the national territory to be liberated, and a common enemy against which to unify the population in a common liberation struggle.
Mere resistance to foreign occupation does not constitute nationalism—for want of a clear ideological grounding, neither Abd al-Qadir’s war in Algeria nor Urabi’s revolt in Egypt can be considered nationalist movements. Without a background nationalist ideology, once the armies had been defeated and the leaders were exiled, there was no political movement to sustain the drive for independence from foreign rule.
It was only after the Europeans had occupied North Africa that the process of national self-definition began there in earnest. What did it mean to be an “Egyptian,” a “Libyan,” a “Tunisian,” “Algerian,” or “Moroccan”? These national labels did not correspond to any meaningful identity for most people in the Arab world. If asked who they were or where they were from, people either would claim a very local identity—a town (“an Alexandrian”), tribe, at most a region (“the Kabyle Mountains”)—or else see themselves as part of a much larger community, such as the Muslimumma, or “community.”
Only Egypt witnessed significant nationalist agitation in the years before the First World War. Reformist Muslim clerics, grappling with paradox of Muslims coming under European Christian rule, began to frame an Islamic response to imperialism. At the same time, a different group of reformers, influenced by the Islamic modernists, set out a secular nationalist agenda. Both the Islamic modernists and the secular nationalists influenced Arab thought and inspired later nationalist movements across the Muslim world.
Two men shaped the debate on Islam and modernity at the end of the nineteenth century: al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), and Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). The two men were partners in an Islamic reform agenda that would shape Islam and nationalism well into the twentieth century.
Al-Afghani was a restless thinker who traveled widely across the Islamic world and Europe, inspiring followers and alarming rulers wherever he went. He spent eight years in Egypt, 1871 to 1879, where he taught at the influential mosque university of al-Azhar. Al-Afghani was a religious scholar by training but a political agitator by inclination. His travels through India, Afghanistan, and Istanbul had impressed on him the magnitude of the threat Europe posed to the Islamic world, and the impotence of the heads of Muslim states in addressing the threat. The central focus of al-Afghani’s political philosophy was not that of how to make Muslim countries politically strong and successful, as was the case with Tanzimat reformers in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Ottoman Empire. Rather, he argued that if modern Muslims lived according to the principles of their religion, their countries would regain their former strength and overcome external threats from Europe.33
Although al-Afghani was convinced that Islam was fully compatible with the modern world, he believed that Muslims needed to update their religion to face the issues of the day. Like all observant Muslims, al-Afghani believed the message of the Qur’an was eternal and equally valid for all times. The part that had grown outdated was the interpretation of the Qur’an, a science that had been deliberately frozen by Islamic scholars in the eleventh century to prevent dissent and schism. Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century were taught theology by the same books as scholars of the twelfth century. Clearly a new interpretation of the Qur’an was called for, to bring Islamic strictures up to date and address the challenges of the nineteenth century—challenges that medieval theologians could never have foreseen. Al-Afghani hoped to constrain Muslim rulers with constitutions based on updated Islamic principles that would put clear limits on their powers, and to stimulate pan-Islamic unity of action among the global community of Muslims. These radical new ideas enflamed a talented generation of young scholars at al-Azhar, including nationalists Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Saad Zaghlul, and the great Islamic modernist, Shaykh Muhammad Abduh.
Born in a village of the Nile Delta, Abduh proved one of the greatest thinkers of his age. Islamic scholar, journalist, and judge, he ended his career as the grand mufti of Egypt, the country’s highest religious functionary. He wrote for the famous Al-Ahramnewspaper, and like al-Tahtawi he served as editor of the Egyptian government’s official gazette. He was one of Ahmad Urabi’s supporters in 1882 and was exiled by the British to Beirut for his pains.
While in exile, Abduh traveled to Western Europe and met up with al-Afghani in Paris, where they launched a reformist journal that called for an Islamic response to Western imperialism. Abduh built on Afghani’s principles to pronounce a more rigorous course of action upon his return to Egypt later in the 1880s.
Abduh’s call for a more progressive Islam, paradoxically, took the first community of Muslims—the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, known in Arabic as the salaf, or forefathers—as a role model. Abduh was thus one of the founders of a new line of reformist thought that came to be called Salafism, a term now associated with Osama bin Ladin and the most radical wing of Muslim anti-Western activism. It was not so in Abduh’s time. By invoking the forefathers of Islam, Abduh was hearkening back to a golden age when Muslims observed their religion “correctly” and, as a consequence, emerged as the dominant world power. This period of Muslim dominance throughout the Mediterranean and extending deep into South Asia, lasted for the first four centuries of Islam. Thereafter, he argued, Islamic thought ossified. Mysticism crept in, rationalism waned, and the community fell into a blind observance of the law. Only by stripping Islam of these accretions could the umma return to the pure and rational practices of the forefathers and recover the dynamism that once made Islam the dominant world civilization.
As a student at al-Azhar, Ahmad Amin had to overcome his diffidence to attend classes given by the great Muhammad Abduh. His recollections of Abduh’s teaching give a vivid sense of the Islamic reformers impact on his students. “I attended two lessons, heard his beautiful voice, saw his venerable appearance, and understood from him what I had not understood from my Azharite shaykhs.” Muhammad Abduh’s reformist agenda was never far from his teaching. “From time to time,” Amin recalled, Abduh “digressed to discuss the conditions of Muslims, their crookedness, and the way to cure them.”34
Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh made Islam an integral part of national identity as Egypt moved into the age of nationalism. In their concern for the state of Muslim society, Abduh and his followers began to debate social reforms along with the national struggle.
In their debates on “the conditions of Muslims,” Muhammad Abduh’s followers began to argue for changes in the position of women in Muslim society. Since their first encounter with Europeans at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Egyptian intellectuals had been confronted by a very different model of gender relations—and disapproved of what they saw. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti was appalled by the impact Napoleon’s men had on Egyptian women. “French local administrators, together with their Muslim wives dressed like French women, would walk in the streets, take interest in public affairs and current regulations,” he noted disapprovingly. “Women commanded and forbade.”35 This was nothing short of an inversion of the natural order, as al-Jabarti understood it, of a world in which men commanded and forbade.
Al-Tahtawi, observing relations between the sexes in Paris thirty years later, also complained about this inversion of the “natural order.” “The men are slaves to the women here and under their command,” he wrote, “irrespective of whether they are pretty or not.”36 Al-Jabarti and al-Tahtawi came from a society where respectable women were confined to separate quarters at home and glided anonymously through public places under layers of clothes and veils. This was still the case in the Cairo of Ahmad Amin’s childhood. Amin described his mother and sisters as “veiled, never seeing people or being seen by them except from behind veils.”37
In the 1890s Egyptian reformers were beginning to articulate a different role for women, none more forcefully than the lawyer Qasim Amin (1863–1908), who argued that the foundation of the national struggle for independence had to begin with improving the position of women in society.
Qasim Amin (no relation to Ahmad Amin) was born into privilege. His Turkish father had served as an Ottoman governor and attained the rank of pasha before moving to Egypt. Qasim was sent to the best private schools in Egypt and went on to study law in Cairo and Montpelier. He returned to Egypt in 1885 and was soon caught up in the reformist circles around Muhammad Abduh.
While his colleagues debated the role of Islam and of the British occupation in Egypt’s national revival, Qasim Amin focused on the status of women. In 1899 he wrote his pioneering work, The Liberation of Women. Writing as a Muslim reformer to a Muslim audience, Qasim Amin connected his arguments to a secular nationalist agenda of liberation from imperialism.
Denied access to education, let alone to the workplace, only 1 percent of women could read and write in Egypt in 1900.38 As Qasim Amin argued then, and as the authors of the Arab Human Development Report still argue today, the failure to empower women disempowers the Arab world as a whole. In Qasim Amin’s words, “Women comprise at least half the total population of the world. Perpetuating their ignorance denies a country the benefits of the abilities of half its population, with obvious negative consequences.”39 His critique, written in classical Arabic, was biting:
Throughout the generations our women have continued to be subordinate to the rule of the strong and are overcome by the powerful tyranny of men. On the other hand, men have not wished to consider women other than as beings fit only to serve men and be led by men’s will! Men have slammed shut the doors of opportunity in women’s faces, thus hindering them from earning a living. As a consequence, the only recourse left to a woman was to be a wife or a whore.40
Qasim Amin drew a contrast between the progress of women’s rights in Europe and America and the contribution of women to civilization in the West, and the relative underdevelopment of Egypt and the Muslim world. “The inferior position of Muslim women is the greatest obstacle that prevents us from advancing toward what is beneficial to us,” he argued.41 He then connected the position of women to the national struggle. “In order to improve the condition of the nation, it is imperative we improve the condition of women.”42
The Liberation of Women provoked intense debate among reformers, conservatives, nationalists, and intellectuals. Conservatives and nationalists condemned Amin’s work as subversive to the fabric of society while religious scholars accused him of subverting God’s order. Qasim Amin responded to his critic with a sequel published the following year under the title The New Woman, in which he abandoned religious rhetoric and argued for women’s rights in terms of evolution, natural rights, and progress.
Qasim Amin’s work does not live up to the expectations of modern feminist thought. This was an argument among men, debating the benefits they should confer on women. In his call to improve education and the general position of women in Egyptian society, Amin fell short of demanding full equality between the sexes. Yet for his time and place, Qasim Amin pushed the agenda of women’s rights farther than had ever been done before. The debates provoked by his work set change in motion. Within twenty years, the initiative would be taken up by elite women in Egypt, who entered the nationalist movement and began to demand their own rights.
Under the impact of the great debates of the day—on national identity, Islamic reform, and social issues like gender equality, a distinct Egyptian nationalism began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. Two men proved most influential in shaping early Egyptian nationalism: Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Mustafa Kamil.
Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) was the son of a rural notable who attended a modern secondary school and, in 1889, entered law school. Though he is acknowledged as one of the disciples of Muhammad Abduh, Lutfi al-Sayyid did not privilege Islam as the basis of national regeneration. Rather, Egypt as a nation was the focus of Lutfi al-Sayyid’s political vision. In this sense, he was one of the very first nation-state nationalists in the Arab world. He differed with those who gave their primary allegiance to the Arabs, or the Ottomans, or to pan-Islamic ideals. As a founding member of the People’s Party, established by the circle of Muhammad Abduh, and through his writings in the newspaper he edited, al-Jarida, he promoted the ideal of an Egyptian nation with a natural right to self-rule.
Lutfi al-Sayyid objected to the British and the khedives as two forms of autocracy denying the Egyptian people legitimate government. Yet he recognized the benefits of sound administration and financial regularity that came with British rule. He also believed that, under the circumstances, it was unrealistic to hope for independence from Britain. The British had vested interests in Egypt and the military strength to uphold them. Rather, Lutfi al-Sayyid argued, the Egyptian people should use the British to change the Egyptian government by imposing a constitution on the khedive and to build up the institutions of indigenous rule—both the Legislative Council and the Provincial Councils.
Ahmad Amin was a regular at Lutfi al-Sayyid’s office at the Jarida newspaper, where Egyptian nationalists would gather to debate the issues of the day. Here Ahmad Amin received his social and political education, “thanks to the lectures of our Professor Lutfi [al-Sayyid] and others, and my contact with a select group of the best intellectuals.”43
Lutfi al-Sayyid represented the moderate wing of the nationalist movement in Egypt, a man who was willing to work with the imperialists to bring Egypt up to a standard where it could achieve independence. There was, however, a more radical version of Egyptian nationalism, and its champion was Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908). Like Lutfi al-Sayyid, he received a modern education in law, in Cairo and in France. He was a founding member of the National Party. While in France, Kamil connected with a number of French nationalist thinkers, who were every bit as hostile toward British imperialism as was the young Egyptian. Kamil returned to his homeland in the mid-1890s to agitate for the end of the British occupation. In 1900 he founded a newspaper, al-Liwa’ (“the banner”), which proved an influential voice piece for the nascent nationalist movement.
Kamil was a brilliant orator and a charismatic young man. He provided the national movement with broad support among students and the street. For a while, he also enjoyed the clandestine support of the khedive Abbas II Hilmi (r. 1892–1914), who hoped to exploit the nationalist movement to put pressure on the British. Yet the young religious scholar Ahmad Amin was not at first won over by Kamil’s radical nationalism, which he dismissed as emotional rather than rational.44
In a sense, the great challenge facing nationalists in Egypt at the start of the twentieth century was that the British had done so little to provoke the Egyptian people to revolt against them. Though the people of Egypt resented the idea of foreign rule, the British brought regular government, stability, and low taxes. Few Egyptians ever came into contact with their British occupiers, who were a remote and self-contained people little given to mixing with the common people of Egypt. Thus, while the Egyptians did not like being under British rule, the British had done nothing to provoke them out of a complacent acceptance of colonial rule.
Until the Dinshaway Incident.
In 1906 a British hunting party entered lands of the village of Dinshaway in the Nile Delta on a pigeon shoot. A group of outraged peasants surrounded the British to stop them from killing their pigeons, which they raised for food. In the fracas that followed, one British officer was injured and died seeking help. Lord Cromer was out of the country at the time, and his caretakers grossly over-reacted. British soldiers arrested fifty-two men from the village and convened a special tribunal, as the Egyptian public followed developments avidly through the newspapers.
Ahmad Amin’s politics and reading habits changed dramatically after the Dinshaway Incident. He remembered the date precisely—June 27, 1906—when he and his friends were having dinner on a roof terrace in Alexandria. “When the newspapers came, we read that four of Dinshaway’s people were sentenced to death, two to hard labor for life, one to fifteen years in prison, six to seven years in prison, and five to fifty lashes each. We were [overcome with grief], the banquet turned into a funeral, and most of us wept.”45Henceforth, Amin claimed, he only read Mustafa Kamil’s radical nationalist newspaper in his local coffee shop.
Amin’s conversion to nationalism was repeated across Egypt. Newspapers conveyed the tragedy to people in the cities, and folk poets spread the news from village to village with the songs they composed recounting the tragedy of Dinshaway and the injustice of British rule.
Calm eventually returned to Egypt, though Dinshaway was not forgotten nor were the British forgiven. In 1906 the foundations for a nationalist movement were all in place. Yet nationalists in Egypt found themselves confronting a British Empire that was looking to expand its presence in the Arab world rather than retreat. Indeed, Britain’s moment in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East was just beginning.