Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  ‘So strange a state of feeling’: The Making of a British Anticolonialist

  When Blunt and the Egyptian leader met for the first time on 6 December 1881, the conversation began with Urabi referring to Lord Byron, Lady Anne’s grandfather. Familiar already, via the Azhar, or Islamic university of Cairo, with Blunt’s reputation as a ‘friend of the fellah cause’, Urabi told his new English acquaintance that, while he knew nothing of Byron’s poetry, he was an admirer of the poet’s contributions to the campaign for liberty in Greece. Fresh from putting together The Future of Islam, Blunt himself was focused on Arabia as ‘the cradle of Eastern liberty and true religion’, not having realized that ‘in the National movement in Egypt the chief interest for me in Islam already lay, as it were, close to my hand’.59 This, he notes, was because he had himself accepted the British establishment’s line that what was taking place was purely military and sinister: ‘I share with most lovers of liberty a distrust of professional soldiers as the champions of any cause not that of tyranny.’60 And indeed, in ways that will not be unfamiliar to the twenty-first-century reader, both press and official sources had taken a virulent pleasure in painting Urabi as a ‘military oppressor’ and ‘dictator’, who had placed a ‘military yoke … around the neck of Egyptians’ while also fostering religious fanaticism.61 Blunt noted not only that there was ‘nothing in him of the fanatic, if fanaticism means religious hatred’, but also that his unmistakable piety did not prevent Urabi making transnational and cross-religious alliances ‘with Jew, Christian, or infidel’.62 Pious though he was, Urabi was no fanatic, but, in the first instance, a class warrior of sorts, representing the fellahin – the tillers of Egyptian land: ‘It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the National movement of 1881 was essentially a fellah movement, having for its object the emancipation of the fellahin … and only incidentally against the Anglo-French control when this last declared itself openly the ally and supporter of that tyranny.’63

  Urabi’s nationalism was focused on land rights and economic grievances rather than on excluding racial or religious outsiders. On the contrary, the fellah leader exuded an open attitude to ‘humanity at large without distinction of race or creed’.64 It is really at this point that Blunt’s growing understanding that freedom from bondage could be thought of as a shared human aspiration rather than one unique to European thought appears to have crystallized into a clear insight. His subsequent letter to Gladstone cut against the prevalent political rendering of ‘freedom’ as a gift from Britain to Egypt – a notion that was already being bandied about as a possible military intervention to end Urabi’s putative despotism was considered. ‘The ideas he expresses are not merely a repetition of the phrases of modern Europe’, Blunt said of Urabi, ‘but are based on a knowledge of history and on the liberal tradition of Arabian thought, inherited from the days when Mohammedanism was liberal’.65 Blunt also insists that Urabi was no mimic man, and that his words were markedly different from the usual language used by Eastern politicians when talking to Europeans. There was no developmental teleology, no ‘nonsense about railroads and canals and tramways as nostrums that could redeem the East’.66 Blunt’s assessment was shared by another of Urabi’s defenders, Lady Gregory, who noted in her demystifying account Arabi and His Household (based on visits, with Lady Anne, to Arabi’s wife and mother) that the Egyptian leader was distrusted by the authorities precisely as a ‘man with ideas’.67

  The son of a fellah headman who had received schooling in the village and then some education at the Azhar in Cairo, Ahmed Urabi al-Hussaini had risen rapidly up the ranks in the army under Khedive Said. The khedive had put in place a controversial policy of fellah advancement in the army, to the dismay of the Turko-Circassian officers who had traditionally enjoyed preferment. They were returned to dominance after Said’s death, thereby laying the groundwork for the fellah military discontent. By the time Blunt heard of him in Cairo, during the autumn of 1881, Urabi had become fairly well known as one of the authors of a petition to redress fellah officers’ grievances. These included withheld pay and the preferential treatment given to Turko-Circassian officers. Fellah soldiers were being made to undertake non-military hard labour, but Urabi had refused to let his men dig canals. The eventual consequence of this affair was an attempt by Khedive Tewfik, on 1 February 1881, to arrest Urabi and two of his fellow officers by summoning them to the palace under a false pretext. The officers were famously and dramatically rescued by their regiments, who forced open the doors of the royal edifice. Consequent to this episode, Blunt writes, Urabi had been invested with the mantle of ‘champion of fellah wrongs against the Turkish ruling class’, a role he appears to have embraced: ‘It must be remembered that in all Egyptian history, for at least three hundred years, no mere fellah had ever risen to a position of any political eminence in Egypt, or had appeared in the light of a reformer, or whispered a word of possible revolt.’68 Blunt had grasped that, in important ways, this was not simply a national struggle in the attenuated sense of ‘natives’ against ‘foreigners’, but an insurgency to reclaim Egypt that had vital class dimensions to it. The second incident took place a few months later, in September 1881, when a series of events led to a direct and dramatic face-to-face confrontation between Khedive Tewfik and Urabi, whose troops had occupied the square in front of Abdin Palace. After dismounting and handing over his sword, Urabi placed three demands before the khedive, whose reply was: ‘I am Khedive of the country and shall do as I please.’69 Urabi’s reply has gone down in legend, entering Egyptian school textbooks: ‘We are not slaves and shall never from this day forth be inherited.’70

  Though educated, Urabi was not an intellectual; he appears to have been driven by a deeply felt sense of class injury as a non-Turkish fellah officer in the Egyptian army, and by a willingness to channel the wider resentment of the fellahin at material inequalities. ‘He seems to be a man’, Lady Anne wrote, ‘who has set himself a task and who never loses sight of the main object of his life, considering himself the servant of that object – the welfare of others and not his own … He may be mistaken in details as to some things, from want of knowledge, but that this does not materially signify.’71 Urabi’s memoirs of the revolution that came to be named after him were published in 1925, after he returned from exile to live and die in obscurity. While not a treatise on the meaning of nationalism, or even the titular ‘awakening’ (nahda), Urabi’s account nonetheless situates his mutinous actions within a wider context of discontent and dissent.72 Land – and the arbitrary grant of land titles to Circassian khedivial favourites, often involving land grabs – were at the heart of the conflict, as were debt and taxation, both of which disproportionately affected the fellahin. In his account, the army and intellectuals came together to protect the rights of the umma – a term that eludes easy translation, but in context clearly refers to the non-Europeans and non-Turks, that is, native Egyptians, as a national community that comes into being precisely through shared subordination and connection to land, rather than necessarily through race or religion.73 There is little here that suggests the demands Urabi made in the name of the umma in January 1881 – including equal, non-discriminatory, non-racialized treatment for native Egyptians and a Majlis Nawab, or Council of Representatives – were developed mainly through contact with Western ideas. Urabi also appears to have gone out of his way to emphasize that equal treatment for Egyptians did not mean hostility to other races, including the Circassians. Indeed, in a speech he gave at the Hussein mosque in central Cairo, he took pains to distinguish the expansive Egyptian sense of freedom from its expansionist European counterpart: ‘Those who read history know that the European nations have achieved freedom through extravagant impetuosity, spilling blood, ravishing honour and perpetrating acts of destruction but we have achieved freedom in an hour without spilling one drop of blood, without terrifying one heart and without touching any one’s honour.’74 Urabi sought precedent for his political claims in Arabic-language works, including
histories and chronicles, giving examples of events in the past where demands for individual or collective rights had been asserted. He was not alone in this; a raft of terms and concepts situated in indigenous traditions and texts were in circulation at the time. In his assessment of the poetry of emergent Egyptian nationalism, for instance, Mounah A. Khouri observes that these terms included adl (justice), hurriya (freedom), qawm (folk, people, nation), shura or mashura (consultation, deliberation).75

  As Juan Cole has noted, discontent and resistance had been germinating for considerably longer than the events associated with Urabi himself would suggest.76 Several different interests and grievances underlay the revolution which finally unfolded in 1882. These included ‘the desire to end the extraordinary privileges of the dual elite (coded as foreign) and to ensure more consultative involvement of the middling sort (coded as indigenous) in governance’.77 Fellah and military discontent turned the mixture combustible. In his essay ‘The Egyptian Revolution’, published in September 1882, Blunt attested to his final conversion in this milieu not just to ‘sympathy’ with the Egyptian, but to something rather more fundamental, indeed visceral. He distinguished his own feelings from those of other critics of the invasion, like Harrison and the MP Wilfrid Lawson, distancing himself from paternalism in the process: ‘Their sympathy is not as that of a man for his own kin, rather as of a man for some ill-treated beast. They do not love the Mussulman “Arabs” of Egypt as I do.’78 Back in Cairo in late 1881, Blunt came to the conclusion that he had wronged the movement in Egypt by being initially suspicious of it: he now found a country united and confidently open in talking the ‘language of religious and political liberty’.79 It was a living, moving exemplar of the ideas that he had only grasped in the abstract in The Future of Islam. Witnessing the struggle had turned his ideational world upside down: ‘During the last few weeks of my stay in Egypt I retired from the European world of Cairo to the world I had learned to love better, that of the Egyptians. I had learned too to respect it.’80 When he did visit the European quarters it was, he claimed, ‘with the feeling that I was descending from a higher to a much lower moral and intellectual level’.81

  The Blunts returned to an England in the spring of 1882 where the political landscape had changed significantly and for the worse. The Liberals, now in power, had abandoned their ‘enthusiasm for Eastern nationalities and Eastern liberty’, and were full of ideas of ‘imperial coercion’ in relation, not least, to Ireland.82 Answering hostile parliamentary questions put to him after the bombardment of Alexandria, Gladstone insisted that, without European intervention, Urabi ‘would have become dictator of the country’. He, in turn, had been told by Edward Malet that ‘the University, the Chamber, and the nation are anxious for the termination of the military despotism which now terrorizes them’.83 At one level, Blunt’s work was cut out for him: to undo the myth-making of imperial self-justification alongside the concomitant demonizing of Islam and Muslims, itself a legacy of the 1857 uprising, which the British authorities blamed largely on Indian Muslims. ‘Fanaticism’ was ‘a convenient word which began now to be freely used in describing the National movement’; even the proposed reduction of the budget of the European Opera House in Cairo, not to mention criticism of wasteful expenditure, became proof of ‘fanaticism’.84 While Urabi was keen ‘to restore good Mussulman government in his country’, he was ‘evidently the reverse of a fanatic’, Blunt pointed out, not least given that his was primarily a movement against the supremacy of another Muslim power.85 ‘Fanaticism’ had become convenient European shorthand for what Blunt described quite simply as ‘the patriotism of the people, to protest against the presence of the French and British fleets’.86 To his mind, the only extant fanaticism was that evident in the efforts of English agents ‘to bring about a revolution counter to the will of the people’.87 Influenced by Blunt, some parliamentarians also enquired why Britain’s way of showing regard for the Egyptian people ‘was to go out and shoot them’.88

  Blunt’s other task, as he saw it, was to persuade the British political classes to take seriously and empathize with what was going on in Egypt in terms of self-assertion, including demands for more consultative rule and better conditions for the fellahin. Translating these into the legitimizing language of nationalism was at once true to how many in Egypt themselves viewed matters – through the lens of wataniyat, or ‘feeling for one’s native land’ – and strategic in relation to British political discourse. Barely four years before, when in opposition, William Gladstone MP had himself sharply criticized calls for intervention in Egypt, although mainly on grounds of inexpediency.89 The gap between the politician’s rhetoric in opposition and his practice in power was one that gave Blunt ammunition in a letter he wrote to Prime Minister Gladstone on the question of Egyptian national feelings:

  I think the lovers of Western progress should rather congratulate themselves on this strange and unlooked for sign of political life in a land which has hitherto been reproached by them as the least thinking portion of the stagnant East. You, sir, I think, once expressed to me your belief that the nations of the East could only regenerate themselves by a spontaneous resumption of their lost national Will, and behold in Egypt that Will has arisen and is now struggling to find words which may persuade Europe of its existence.90

  His own project, then, would be to help find those words by interpreting the texts of resistance and change. It is worth recalling here, given our own dominant post-national theoretical sensibilities, that in the context of late-Victorian Britain’s imperial world order, nationhood was not usually conceded to societies outside Europe. Recall, for instance, J. S. Mill’s firm pronouncement that ‘barbarians have no rights as a nation’, though they could eventually be made fit to become one.91

  Blunt’s interventions making the case both for Egyptian ‘nationalism’ and for Islam’s ‘liberal’ traditions naturally raise questions for the postcolonial reader. If, on the one hand, Blunt identifies a British failure to accord equality of aspiration to Egyptians resisting foreign rule and demanding representative institutions, is he, on the other, culpable of grafting European political categories onto a distinctly non-European and very different cultural context? Is he simplistically turning Egypt’s singularities into a variation on familiar categories for the purposes of European comprehension?92 In his incipiently modernist way, Blunt as mediator may have committed that most postmodern of crimes: the denial of difference. Yet, to level this charge is to overlook the ways in which Blunt’s Eurocentric liberal abstractions had been, first, undone by his study of Islam, and then reconfigured by a milieu of revolutionary ferment. The Englishman may have set himself the task of interpreting his countrymen and the Egyptians to each other; but in the process it was he who found himself learning new languages. A somewhat theoretical insight into how Islam was not lacking in ideas of liberty and consultative governance was given heft and texture when Blunt witnessed a largely Muslim society in historical turmoil around questions of class, nationality and rights. Part of Blunt’s rationale in using the language of democratic constitutional nationalism was to counter the pernicious Orientalism of British colonial claims, such as that made by Edward Dicey: ‘In Egypt – as, for that matter, in any Mussulman country – parliamentary government is an impossibility.’ Dicey believed that representation and taxation should both be considered as ‘incomprehensible to the Oriental mind as the differential calculus would be to a ploughboy’.93 Where questionable assertions of alterity were made the basis of rule, the assertion of common capacities could be a form of resistance.

  The Intellectual Background

  A few weeks before the Joint Note sent waves of indignation across Egyptian shores, Blunt, after consulting with Urabi, had drafted a ‘studiously moderate’ memorandum detailing the nationalist agenda, which was sent to Gladstone and published in The Times on 3 January 1882.94 It was an attempt to persuade politicians and the broadsheet-reading classes of the existence of a coherent nationalist pro
gramme in Egypt under Urabi in terms that would render it legitimate to them.95 The ‘Programme’ made clear its commitment to pan-Islamism in reiterating an allegiance to the sultan of Turkey as the caliph, but insisted that the khedive, as his representative, must reign ‘in accordance with justice and the law’, and with the help of a Majlis Shoura or Council of Deputies. It attempted to soothe European bondholder and Dual Control sensibilities by declaring that Egypt accepted the entirety of the foreign debt as a matter of national honour, though a matter-of-fact bitterness underlay the adjacent observation that the debt was ‘incurred not for Egypt’s benefit, but in the private interests of a dishonest and irresponsible ruler’.96 It called for special privileges for Europeans, including exemption from general taxation, to cease. Becoming more forceful as it went on, the Programme was plain-spoken in stating the vision of Egyptian nationalists: ‘Their object is some day to see Egypt entirely in Egyptian hands’.97 The text was not, despite Malet’s claims, an inauthentic confection drawn up by Blunt on his own. While it is clear that this document was attempting to articulate various Egyptian aspirations to liberty and justice, communicating them to a British readership in the recognizable language of national sovereignty, it manifestly drew on rich resources specific to the Egyptian context, not least the intellectual milieu of Islamic ‘reawakening’ and reform.

  The late nineteenth century in Egypt had seen the emergence of several circles for intellectual debate and political engagement, including the Mahfil at-Taqaddum (Circle of Progress), Jamiyat Muhibbi al‘Ilm (Society of the Lovers of Knowledge) and Misr al-Fatah (Young Egypt). Dissident journalism had become an important part of the Egyptian scene, with newspapers such as Misr, run by the Syrian Christian Adib Ishaq, taking strongly anti-imperialist lines while still engaging with European ideas. Ishaq, among others, did not see ‘liberty’ as deriving from the West, but as having an ancient home in the East to which it was now returning.98 Blunt had come to know influential figures like the wandering and determinedly enigmatic Islamic scholar Jamal-ud-din al-Afghani, describing him memorably as a ‘wild man of genius’ who was able to make the case for reform and progress ‘from below’, showing how these were wholly compatible with Islamic law and the Koran. Blunt also became lifelong friends with Afghani’s disciple and Urabi’s ally, Muhammad Abdu (sometimes spelled Abduh), who would eventually become grand mufti at Cairo.99 Both men were acutely concerned with the need for Muslim societies to respond robustly to the West’s claims to civilizational superiority – and thus political dominance – through scientific learning and social progress.