One must begin a century ago, with the British. Egypt was never fully assimilated into their empire, but the completion of the Suez Canal and imperial interests in East Africa led to the country being designated, in 1883, an English protectorate. Like all superpowers, Victoria’s Britain tended to mask naked force with piety and cant. In 1888 Suez was grandly proclaimed a world waterway, to be open in war and peace alike, but as the Germans discovered in two world wars, there was a lot of fine print about the safeguarding of H.M.’s interests. Again, in 1899 London announced that the Sudan would be jointly ruled by Englishmen and Egyptians. In fact, however, that jungly country was governed by Britons, to the mortification of Egypt, whose troops had played a major role in its subjugation.
Theoretically the supreme being in Cairo was the native khedive, or viceroy. In practice the reins of power were in the hands of the English High Commissioner. That situation began to change on November 13, 1918, just two days after the Armistice, when three Cairo politicians called on Commissioner Sir Reginald Wingate and demanded autonomy for Egypt. They declared that it was their intention to lead a delegation which would plead their case in London. H.M.’s government refused to receive them and arrested their leader, Saad Zaghlul Pasha, but the Arabic word for delegation (wafd) dominated Egyptian politics for the next thirty-four years. It became the name of the country’s largest political party, which triumphed in one general election after another and wrung its hands in frustration much of the time, as constitutional rights were frequently suspended and the nation was ruled by imperial decree.
The constitution, promulgated on April 19, 1923, was a direct outgrowth of the rise of nationalist feeling in Cairo. Demonstrations by Zaghlul’s followers had secured his release from prison and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The former khedive was now a sovereign—King Fuad I—under whom the new nation was administered by a premier and a parliament, with some of the legislators appointed and the rest elected by universal manhood suffrage. Most of this was cosmetics, however. The British army remained, and despite the declaration of independence England retained control of defense, communications, the protection of foreign interests, and the person of Fuad I.
These matters were supposed to be settled in an Anglo-Egyptian treaty, but negotiations dragged on for over a decade with no tangible result. Then, in the mid-1930s, London suddenly became interested in reaching an agreement. Deteriorating relations between Whitehall and Rome over the Ethiopian question prompted the British to sign a pact in August 1936 under which Egyptian troops were admitted to the Sudan, England kept its naval base in Alexandria, and 10,000 tommies remained in the Canal Zone, with the provision that the number might be increased in wartime. Egypt was to become a member of the League of Nations. Fuad having died the previous May, his son Farouk, then still a minor, became the new king.
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Some idea of the Egyptian constitution’s precision may be gathered from the fact that everything Naguib and the Free Officers junta did, including the abolition of all political parties and the expropriation of vast tracts of privately owned land, was entirely legal. All the trappings of democracy were there, including a cabinet and a judicial authority, but because the electorate was so impoverished and illiterate—one in six could write—control fell into the hands of the country’s peerage, the pashas and beys. One group of them haunted the palace and influenced the king; the rest ran the Wafd and, through it, the parliament. The leader of the Wafd was a square-faced, mustachioed old man named Mustafa en Nahas who succeeded to the party’s leadership in 1927, when Zaghlul died. In 1934 Nahas married Zeinab el Wakil, more familiarly known as Zuzu, who may be remembered as the lady with the stickiest fingers in 5,000 years of Egyptian civilization. She was certainly the most unsubtle, which was one reason Naguib became premier, a job Zuzu’s husband had held five times before his dismissal in disgrace after Farouk’s abdication.
After 1936 the Wafd continued to thrive under the new king and the new treaty with England. Its success was based on a perfectly sound political principle: throw the British out of Suez and the Sudan. That was its high mission, drummed into the fellaheen in tremendous rallies every year. But as time passed and the tommies stayed, another, less lofty mission took over. The Wafd became little more than a huge graft engine. Corruption spread throughout the government; everyone knew about it, and anybody with influence had a hand in it. Farouk was the ideal king for such a regime. Between days of poring over his monumental collections of matchbook covers and American comic books, and nights of pleasure with adolescent girls he would choose at random while driving through crowds, the obese monarch managed to get his pudgy finger deep enough into the pie so that, when he finally fled the country, he had a quarter of a billion dollars in Egyptian holdings and enough abroad to finance his retirement to a twenty-room suite in Capri’s Eden Paradiso Hotel.
The trouble with political principles is that if they are going to work, they must sound good, and if they sound good enough, they are liable to convince some able men that they are just. In the case of the Wafd’s Anglophobia, the convinced were Egyptian army officers. There weren’t many of them, but they were devoted patriots, and in February 1942, when a British general surrounded Farouk’s palace with tanks and forced the dismissal of Premier Ali Maher, whom he suspected of collaboration with the Nazis, they were humiliated. That intervention was costly in other ways—it confirmed the king’s hostility toward Britain, divided the Wafd, and stigmatized Nahas, who replaced Maher—but its most profound effect was the mortification of the Egyptian soldiers who had been unable to defend their government.
Nasser, then in his early twenties, was posted to the Sudan. There he met three sympathetic brother officers: Zakaria Mohieddene, later vice president of the United Arab Republic; Abdel Hakim Amer, later field marshal; and Anwar el Sadat. Together they formed the Free Officers as a revolutionary organization. Its membership would be known only to Nasser; its goal would be the expulsion of the British and, if necessary, the Egyptian royal family. Meanwhile it would lobby for reforms to strengthen the army. Certainly the army needed it. Equipment was obsolete, discipline was a joke, and the entire military establishment was as formidable as a palace bodyguard, which was really all it had been.
These were the troops Farouk sent against Israel in 1948, and these were the officers—there were now eighty-nine in the clique—who returned to Egypt burning with shame after the outnumbered Jews pushed them all over the Negev desert and forced them into a degrading armistice. The world believed that the superior skill of the Israeli soldiers had defeated them, but they were unconvinced, and for an understandable reason. Repeatedly their own shells had exploded prematurely in the field, killing Egyptians. Some of their leaders, notably Naguib, had performed brilliantly under fire, but Nasser’s experience was more typical. He had served in one of three battalions which had been surrounded for weeks by the Israelis in a group of Arab villages called the Faluja Pocket. Repatriated, he rode home in bitter silence, set up headquarters in Cairo’s Officers’ Club, and started digging for the truth.
In the summer of 1950 it started to come out, less as a result of his efforts than because Egypt under the British had developed a strong tradition of crusading political journalism. Akhbar El Yom, the most enterprising of Cairo’s newspapers, published signed stories by General Fuad Sadek Pasha, who had been Egypt’s commander in the Negev, charging that ammunition had been defective. Nahas authorized an investigation. Then, rather shortsightedly, he left for Paris. Since the king was on the Riviera, there was no one around with sufficient authority to stop the prosecutor general from peering into the bulging safe-deposit boxes of the palace advisers. The facts, it developed, were that munitions money had been misappropriated and misspent, and the safe-deposit boxes contained the loot. Before the frantic pashas could quash the inquiry, a dozen indictments had been handed down. Then the government solemnly decided that the king’s honor was involved, and a successful cover-up began. Shortly
thereafter a mysterious fire destroyed a surplus ammunition dump at Helwan, just south of Cairo, and everyone assumed that things would quiet down.
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In September the eager prosecutors got out of hand again. This time they nosed around the cotton exchange in Alexandria and came up with evidence that Zuzu Nahas, the premier’s wife, and Fuad Sereg ed Din, the fat, flabby secretary-general of the Wafd and the cabinet’s finance minister, had rigged the market. Serag ed Din began by setting a low minimum; sellers couldn’t charge more than that. Prices dropped, and Zuzu bought. Next the minimum was jacked. Merchants had to buy from her. There were two difficulties with this cozy arrangement. The first was that Serag ed Din set his new minimums so high that British buyers from Lancashire and Yorkshire decided to go elsewhere, and the middlemen were stuck. The second was that Zuzu had an extraordinarily loud voice. Whenever she telephoned her associates, anyone who happened to be in the room could hear her over the phone, and since on the occasion there was a cabinet meeting in the room of the associate she was calling, everyone knew about the racket.
On October 14, 1950, the leaders of the Wafd’s opposition formally asked Farouk to clean his house. Nahas, outraged at this impertinence, replied that it was high treason to speak to the king that way, and that if he were Farouk, he wouldn’t put up with it. The king did nothing, but Akhbar El Yom stepped up its pressure. In November a mob tried to burn down the newspaper’s plant (one demonstrator was killed, and Nahas closed Cairo’s schools so the children could attend his funeral), and in 1951 the paper’s editions were confiscated twenty-two times, but Mustafa and Ali Amin, the twin brothers who published it, merely put out two editions, one for the confiscators and another for their subscribers. The operation cost them $300,000, but in the autumn of 1951 they turned up two classic scandals, and the repercussions started the chain of events which ended with Farouk’s abdication.
Nahas had announced that the government felt sorry for the fellaheen and was therefore distributing among the landless a couple of hundred feddans of prime land near Alexandria. A feddan is one and one-sixteenth acres, and in a land-hungry country it was quite a prize. Akhbar El Yom investigated and discovered that the land was not agricultural but residential, worth between $1,500 and $3,000 a feddan. They further found that, apart from a few minor children who weren’t old enough to be pashas or pashas’ wives, the twenty grantees could scarcely be called landless. The list consisted of three of Zuzu’s brothers, three of her nephews, three of her nieces, two of her sisters-in-law, two of her cousins, her sister, her brother-in-law, the sister-in-law of one of her brothers, her great-niece, her lady in waiting, her secretary, and her husband’s cousin.
Cairo was still marveling at this three weeks later when the Amins published a list of the winners of a recent lottery in which the government had raffled off twenty-two houses. Over 80,000 Egyptians had participated. The holders of the lucky numbers were led by one of Nahas’ cousins, followed by two of his nephews, five of his secretaries, six of his aides, the switchboard operator at his home, the brother and son of the minister of communications, the brother of the minister of foreign affairs, the leader of the Wafdist Youth, the secretary of the minister of economy, another of Nahas’ cousins, and, just in the money, the official who had been confiscating Akhbar El Yom every other week for a year.
Nahas agreed that this was an amazing coincidence, but his colleagues in the Wafd told him he would have to do better than that, and so, three days later, he stood tearfully in parliament and asked for the abrogation of the 1936 treaty, which he, as premier, had signed for Egypt. The British, he explained, had been behaving very badly. You couldn’t work with such people. They would have to get out of Suez right away. Diverting public attention from internal corruption to foreign affairs was an old Wafd trick, but this time it worked too well. The Canal Zone was a bad place to wave the flag. For generations a small army of Egyptian thieves had lived off British stores, held in check only by native police. Now the police enthusiastically joined the pilferers, and on October 17, the day after the Wafdist parliament ratified the abrogation a British PX in Ismailia, a town about halfway between Port Said and Suez, was looted of $85,000 worth of stock and then burned.
Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine, the British commander, pulled his troops out of Ismailia to avoid trouble, but Sereg ed Din, who had been promoted to minister of the interior after his spectacular feats in the cotton market, sent 1,000 auxiliary police into the town. They built it into a guerrilla base and sent raiding parties behind Sir George’s lines. By mid-January of 1952 the situation was darkening every day, and when a stray shot, fired on the grounds of an Ismailia convent, killed an American nun, Erskine decided to go back and clean the town out. He asked the police to surrender. They refused. On January 25 he surrounded their barracks and poured lead at them all day. When the policemen who were still alive ran out of ammunition and gave up, there were forty-six Egyptian corpses inside.
***
The next day Cairo erupted in riots which killed seventeen foreign residents and destroyed Shepheard’s Hotel, the Turf Club, and a half-dozen English movie houses. No one really knew who started the trouble—the Wafd, the British, the Communists, the Moslem Brotherhood (a vague, semireligious, semipolitical organization with fanatical factions), and Farouk were variously blamed—but the best evidence is that the outbreaks were spontaneous. A gang of students organized a protest march on the palace at 9 A.M. They walked right by Shepheard’s without incident, but when they got to Opera Square they glanced into a cabaret and saw an army officer squeezing a belly dancer. The contrast between his laughter and the martyrs in Ismailia was too much for them; they broke ranks and swarmed in on him.
Afterward no one pretended to know the sequence of events which followed. There were flashes of incident—American women cowering in their hairdressers’ closets, Englishmen at the Turf Club ignoring their twelve-minute warning and going out to face the angry knives—but coherence was too much to expect from the foreigners who survived. The confused mobs that welled out of the ancient slums behind El Azhar, the great Moslem university, were as disorganized as their victims, and they, too, lacked any clear idea of what had happened. Somehow the army kept them off Gezira Island, the city’s most fashionable suburb, but when night fell at last they had destroyed $300,000 worth of property.
Farouk sacked Nahas and Serag ed Din, called in Ali Maher, the premier whose resignation the British had forced ten years earlier, and told him to put out the fire. Maher did a workmanlike job, for he was a good administrator, whatever his sympathies during the war, but within a month he was out and the king was playing politics again. Throughout the spring premiers succeeded one another with bewildering speed. In the country things were drifting badly. Here and there the fellaheen were shooting estate managers and burning plantations, and the cotton brokers were still stuck with the vast stocks they had bought from Zuzu.
Colonel Nasser and his Free Officers decided that they had had enough. By now the clique’s leadership had shaken down to a nine-man High Committee. (Later the committee was expanded to thirteen.) After the arms investigation they had sworn to act if the country wasn’t cleaned up by 1955, but lately they had been getting impatient. Farouk had been feuding with them since the previous fall, when he had appointed his palace pet, General Hussein Sirry Amer, commander of the élite Frontier Corps, passing over the respected Naguib. The officers had despised Sirry Amer ever since the investigations of 1950 had indicated that he had run guns into Israel during the Palestine War, and when Farouk compounded the insult by demanding that he be elected chairman of the Officers’ Club board, they defiantly picked Naguib instead.
Nasser was later reported to have spent most of his time, on the day of the January riots, hunting for Sirry Amer in the hope of killing him in the confusion, and the Free Officers were still unreconciled to him in early July, when Farouk again backed him for the chairmanship. They reelected Naguib. The king struck back by
dissolving the club and firing a premier who had wanted to go along with the committee and give Naguib the war minister’s portfolio. Instead, Farouk insisted on a premier who would give it to his royal brother-in-law. That did it. Sirry Amer had lived by his wits long enough to know that the Free Officers had reached the flash point, and on the eve of the new cabinet’s swearing-in he decided to get out of the country. In the middle of the night he rushed from his house in his pajamas, packed his family in his car, and headed for the Libyan border. Libya considered his dress too informal and wouldn’t let him in. By the time he got back his enemies had taken over the government, and he was arrested for being out of uniform. Later the charge was changed to attempted desertion, and the following winter a court-martial stripped him of his rank, threw him out of the army, and sentenced him to life at hard labor.
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The coup was so well-planned that a lot of people thought it might have been managed by a mission of fifty former German officers who had arrived the year before to give the government technical advice. The same people thought it highly significant that the emblem of Nasser’s Liberation Rally, which replaced Egypt’s dissolved political parties, was an eagle. Actually the Germans were confined to their quarters the night Farouk was deposed; when they were released and they looked around, they were just as surprised as everybody else. And the Free Officers’ symbolic bird didn’t look at all like the starved crow Hitler wore. It was almost North American, and it was certainly bald. The fact is that Egypt was made for a coup, psychologically and geographically. It wasn’t particularly difficult to move a few tanks into Cairo and Alexandria. After that it was largely a matter of determining what the people thought.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 42