A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  There was no doubt that Egypt was now better administered than before. Government decisions were normally carried out; an effective and reasonably uncorrupt civil service was being created. One of the most important factors in this was that the British officials in the Anglo-Egyptian service were collecting the kind of statistical information without which effective government is impossible. In this respect Egypt was unique in the Ottoman Empire.

  With the exception of a few Liberal and Radical MPs at Westminster, the British people, encouraged by the evidence of the tens of thousands of tourists who poured into Egypt every winter, had no doubt that the Egyptians should be wholly grateful for Cromer’s efforts on their behalf. The reaction of the Egyptians was inevitably more various and complex. The khedive and his ministers, together with the Turco-Circassian ruling class from which they almost exclusively came, were happy that their power had been restored and that a radical nationalist upheaval had been averted. Their view was shared by those who had been temporarily swept by enthusiasm for the Arabi revolt. Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, the most important of Arabi’s civilian supporters, decided to collaborate with the British occupiers when he was allowed to return from exile in 1884. He agreed to become a judge and began to work for the reform and modernization of Islamic education in Egypt. Cromer liked and respected him but felt that his task was impossible.

  If the Egyptian ruling class temporarily accepted the presence of British troops, however, it was much less enthusiastic about what Nubar Pasha, the first prime minister after 1882, called the ‘administrative occupation’. Nubar tried to retain Egyptian control over the civil police, but failed. His successor, Riaz Pasha, was equally unsuccessful in preventing European supervision of the legal system – European inspectors were appointed to the native courts. On both these matters Cromer was adamant. The truth was that inside every Egyptian, however much he had benefited materially from the British occupation, there was some degree of resentment against rule by a Christian European power. Inevitably, this resentment would grow over the years.

  In the early years of the British occupation there was a remarkable growth in rural unrest and acts of brigandage. This both alarmed and mystified Cromer, who had a passion for good order. It was partly a grass-roots rejection of the occupation but it also reflected the breakdown of the traditional system whereby the omdehs or village mayors, appointed by the government, maintained law and order in the countryside in collaboration with the Islamic qadis or judges. Although the omdehs were sometimes arbitrary and cruel, they generally reflected the local viewpoint. It was a system that the fellah could understand.

  It is true that European secularist principles of law had already been introduced into Egypt long before the British occupation. Muhammad Ali had started the process, which was extended by the introduction of the new Ottoman penal code, based on French law, in 1863. By 1880 the Islamic sharia law was confined to matters of personal status (divorce, inheritance etc.) and homicide. The trouble was that these principles were now being applied much more widely – to matters of government as well as law – under the aegis of a Christian colonial power. At least this was the theory.

  In 1883 Lord Dufferin actually persuaded Tewfik to issue an Organic Law granting the right of universal suffrage to male Egyptians over twenty years of age. But Cromer saw to it that the elected legislative and provincial councils remained powerless. As we have seen, he had no faith in the capacity of Egyptians to govern themselves, and he considered representative institutions to be entirely unsuitable for the government of a ‘subject race’.

  Nor did Cromer believe there was any purpose in training an élite of native Egyptians to take over the higher executive positions – in fact, during his twenty-four years in Egypt, their numbers in the higher ranks of the government service actually declined, while those of Englishmen and other Europeans increased. Accordingly, he had little interest in the spread of education above the elementary level. From his experience in India he had concluded that the expansion of Western-style higher education manufactured a class of discontented and place-seeking demagogues who were divorced from their own people. As he wrote shortly before his retirement, ‘I am doing all I can to push forward both elementary and technical education. I want all the next generation of Egyptians to be able to read and write. Also I want to create as many carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers etc., as I possibly can. More than this I cannot do.’ Unfortunately, even these efforts were not very successful. On his retirement, about 1.5 per cent of the population was receiving primary education as compared with 1.7 per cent in 1873, and the vast majority remained illiterate.

  Cromer reversed Muhammad Ali’s and Ismail’s policy of providing free education in state schools and colleges. His laissez-faire principles told him that it was not the state’s duty to provide education, and this also accorded with his general aim to economize. The result was that higher education became the prerogative of the wealthy. Like the great majority of his British colleagues in Egypt, Cromer was unsympathetic towards proposals to establish a university, which he believed would foster dangerous nationalism. However, he did not interfere with the higher institutes of learning which had survived from Ismail’s reign: the schools of medicine, engineering and law. Since the reformed Egyptian legal system was based on French law, the teachers in the law school were French and it was this, in the absence of a university, which became the focus of nationalism.

  The obverse side of the neglect of education under Cromer was that there was no systematic attempt to impose English culture on Egypt in the manner in which the French aimed to produce a Gallicized élite in their North African possessions. The educational system was only partially and gradually brought under British control and Anglicized. Although the use of English inevitably became more widespread, and ambitious young Egyptians needed to acquire it, the Egyptian upper classes remained francophone. This was partly because of the limitations of the Veiled Protectorate and partly because Cromer would have regarded the effort to turn the native Egyptians into pseudo-Englishmen as futile; he had nothing but contempt for the few Egyptians who managed to acquire a university education abroad and became europeanized.

  It was therefore natural that Cromer should make no attempt to interfere with the Islamic system of education which existed in the village kuttabs or Koranic schools and the madrasas attached to the mosques which served for secondary education. This would have provoked a most hostile reaction. Again the principle of laissez-faire served all his purposes. But while he respected the laws of Islam, he expressed the view that as a progressive social system it was a total failure. He often said that Egypt could never have a genuinely civilized society under Islam – the position of women alone making this impossible – but he had no wish to see Egyptians abandon their religion. He felt that the europeanized Egyptian he so despised was ‘generally an agnostic’. But while he sympathized with the efforts of Muhammad Abduh – who had become grand mufti of Egypt – to reform and modernize the education system at the great al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was sure they were fruitless because ‘reformed Islam is Islam no longer.’

  Cromer’s authoritarianism was so often negative rather than positive in its expression. He favoured laissez-faire rather than firm government action. He considered that Egypt was a natural agricultural country and that the fellah was a good farmer – better than his Indian equivalent – who with enough land and low taxation would produce well. He considered Muhammad Ali’s ambition to turn Egypt into a manufacturing country as unrealistic, as it would have required heavy protective tariffs and an expensive programme of industrial training for Egyptians, to which he was naturally opposed.

  With prudent financial management Egypt was prosperous at the turn of the century, and real per capita income was probably higher than at any subsequent period. But this concealed some real weaknesses. The level of dependence on a single crop – cotton – was dangerous, and there were technical problems in overflooding from irrigation through lack of dra
inage and a variety of cotton pests which the parsimonious government was hesitant to tackle. Moreover, although Cromer hoped for the creation of a large class of Egyptian small farmers who would act as a conservative bulwark to society, only the most vigorous government action could have prevented the new prosperity from accruing to those who were already economically powerful – the big landowners – while the fellahin sank deeper into debt. After twenty-four years of Cromerism, 80 per cent of those who owned land in Egypt possessed less than 25 per cent of the whole, while at the other end of the scale 1 per cent owned more than 40 per cent of the whole.

  Egyptian nationalists would later claim that Cromer deliberately planned to make Egypt a vast cotton plantation, producing cheap raw material for the Lancashire cotton mills. But he had no such conscious intention – to him this was a natural role for a ‘subject race’. Moreover, although he would not have liked to admit it, he was in many respects continuing the policies of Ismail.

  In 1892 Khedive Tewfik died and was succeeded by his 17-year-old son Abbas Hilmi, who was being educated in Europe. Cromer at first thought that Abbas would be as pliable as Tewfik, but he was intelligent and forceful – more in the mould of his grandfather Ismail than his father. Soon he attempted to assert himself by rejecting Cromer’s choice of ministers and criticizing the standard of the British-trained Egyptian army. Since his succession coincided with the first new stirrings of nationalist feeling since the collapse of the Arabi revolt, Abbas began to see himself as leading a challenge to British rule. Cromer was thoroughly alarmed.

  His fears were unnecessary. Abbas was hoping for help from Istanbul – Egypt was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. But, as usual, Sultan Abdul Hamid gave no more than verbal promises of support, as he was quite unprepared to risk his relations with Britain or the other European powers, which might have no love for the British occupation but equally had no wish to see any revival of Egyptian independence. Abbas had also hoped that the return to power of Gladstone’s Liberal government in Britain would help him, because the Liberals professed greater understanding of Egyptian nationalism than the Tories. Unfortunately, Gladstone’s foreign secretary was Lord Rosebery, a Liberal imperialist who gave his full support to Cromer. Seeing that he could be forced to abdicate, the humiliated Abbas capitulated. The Veiled Protectorate continued, with Cromer pulling the strings behind his screen.

  When Abbas challenged the quality of the Anglo-Egyptian army, a furious Kitchener, its sirdar or commander-in-chief, threatened to resign. Since the army’s dissolution in 1882, British officers had trained a new force of some 15,000 which included five black battalions of southern Sudanese tribesmen. (The cost was borne by the Egyptian budget, with an additional contribution towards the stationing of the British occupying troops.) The first purpose of the new army was to help defend Egypt’s borders, but by 1892 both Cromer and the British government had come to regard the reconquest of the Sudan as vital. Italy had penetrated Ethiopia and was threatening to gain control of the waters of the Upper Nile, and, as Cromer wrote to London, ‘Whatever Powers hold the Upper Nile Valley must, by the mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt.’

  Reconquest began in 1895. Cautiously and economically, Kitchener’s army, strengthened by 8,000 British troops, advanced up the Nile and finally routed the Mahdist forces outside their capital, Omdurman.

  The difficult question arose as to the future status of the Sudan. The reconquest had been directed by Britain but it had been carried out in the khedive’s name mainly by Egyptian troops at Egypt’s expense. But there was no question of restoring the status quo of before the Mahdist revolt. In Salisbury’s words, the British government had every intention of keeping ‘a predominant voice in all matters connected with the Sudan’. The result was the decision to establish an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. Hailed as a masterpiece of British pragmatism, this worked reasonably well for some years. One advantage was that it prevented the system of Capitulations from being extended to the Sudan. But the theoretical equality of Britain and Egypt in the government of Sudan was no more than a façade: the higher levels of the administration were all in British hands, and the governor-general, who was appointed by the khedive on British advice, was always an Englishman. Egyptians had not abandoned their claim to rule Sudan and as they recovered their independence from Britain this became the most contentious issue between Britain and Egypt.

  The nationalist renaissance in Egypt, on which Khedive Abbas had vainly hoped to capitalize, gathered strength in Cromer’s last years, before his retirement in 1907. It found its leader in a slender and passionate youth named Mustafa Kamel, who, like several other nationalists, had studied law in Cairo and in France, where he had received encouragement for his views. Cromer was inclined to dismiss the nationalists as insignificant, and it was true that they had all the characteristics of salon intellectuals – powerfully eloquent but weak in practical proposals to meet the needs of ordinary Egyptians, from whose feelings they were divorced. These weaknesses were partly due to their style of education but also arose because the Veiled Protectorate denied them any prospect of taking a part in government.

  The nationalists were also confused in their aims. Kamel was attracted to the pan-Islamic movement as the best weapon against the British occupation, and he received some secret encouragement and funds for his National Party from the sultan. But the illogicality of combining pan-Islamicism with Egyptian territorial nationalism was exposed in 1906 when Abdul Hamid, who was building a railway across Arabia to Medina, landed a force at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and laid claim to the whole of the Sinai peninsula. Kamel and his party launched a vigorous campaign in his support. It was left to Cromer to insist that Sinai belonged to Egypt. His concern was to protect the Suez Canal from the Turks, but it was he rather than the nationalists who championed the cause of Egyptian territorial integrity.

  Cromer allowed a free press to flourish in Egypt. He had a liberal streak, but principally he did not think that fiery nationalist editorials (Kamel founded his own paper in 1900) were a threat to his order. The ironic consequence was that there was greater freedom of the spoken and written word in Egypt than in the Arab Ottoman provinces. Two leading newspapers were founded in Cairo by Arab Christians from Syria.

  The press was by no means exclusively anti-British, nor were all politically active supporters of Mustafa Kamel nationalists – some were more collaborators, who were doing well out of the British occupation and saw no advantage in bringing it to an end. But there were moderates to whom Cromer gave headmasterly approval as ‘the Girondists of the Egyptian national movement’. These included Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, who died in 1905, and his spiritual disciples in the Umma or People’s Party. They doubted Kamel’s political judgement, especially during the Aqaba incident. Another moderate was Saad Zaghloul, a young lawyer. Cromer allowed him to become head of the newly created education department and, when Cromer left Egypt, warmly commended him as the ideal type of moderate nationalist. But Zaghloul was to become the representative of uncompromising nationalism and Britain’s implacable enemy.

  In 1906, despite Kamel’s powerful charisma, his movement was losing ground. Then an event occurred which united the national feelings of all Egyptians. Although hardly momentous in itself, it was a turning-point in the British occupation and its effects may be compared with the effect on the Indian independence movement of the Amritsar massacre in 1919. At Denshawai, a small Delta village, a shooting-party of British officers was set upon and beaten by outraged fellahin who believed that the British were killing the pigeons which were the local staple diet. An officer who went for help died of concussion and heat-stroke. A fellah who tried to help him was found by a party of British soldiers who, assuming he had murdered the officer, beat him to death.

  Cromer and his colleagues, backed by the British press, saw the incident as a symptom of the xenophobic fanaticism that was sweeping the countryside, fanned by the nationalists. Exemplary punishment was requir
ed. A special tribunal sentenced four to hang, seventeen more to prison or flogging. The sentences were carried out on the site, and the villagers were compelled to watch.

  This was not an atypical act of colonial repression – the horrified reaction of educated Egyptians may be taken as a tribute to the general physical mildness of the British occupation. But the shock and outrage, even among those who had come to accept the British presence, gave a lasting impetus to the national movement. When Cromer retired in the following year, the silent Egyptian crowds watched him on his route to Cairo station from behind British troops with fixed bayonets.

  Cromer’s reputation remained high in Britain and his own self-congratulatory account of his achievements was generally accepted, although some close observers felt that he had become increasingly out of touch, surrounding himself with nonentities like any autocrat. In 1906 a reforming Liberal government had swept to power in Britain, however, and it was clearly time for a change.

  The choice of successor fell on Eldon Gorst, a senior diplomat who had spent nearly twenty years in Egypt and, as financial adviser to the Egyptian government, had led the negotiations with France over the 1904 Entente Cordiale. Small, highly ambitious and academically brilliant, his outward sense of superiority concealed an inner lack of self-confidence. He lacked Cromer’s presence but, unlike Cromer, he spoke excellent Arabic. He was not much liked by other Anglo-Egyptian officials.

  Gorst was thrilled with his appointment. He wrote, ‘Throughout the British Empire there is no place in which the occupant enjoys greater freedom of action than that of British Agent and consul-general in Egypt. The consul-general is de facto ruler of the country, without being hampered by a parliament or by a network of councils like the viceroy of India…’ But, having stepped into Cromer’s shoes, he felt that a change of direction was needed: