A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  In Britain the Conservatives won the October 1951 elections. They were to remain in power for the next thirteen years. Churchill returned as prime minister and Eden as foreign secretary. Egypt retained its prime importance in their eyes, but there was no obvious solution to the crisis. The Suez base was maintained by importing labour from East Africa, but it had been rendered useless as the 80,000 British were occupied in defending the base against sabotage. The alternative was the reoccupation of Cairo, which was something that even the imperialist Churchill was unwilling to contemplate.

  As the guerrilla attacks were stepped up, the British extended their countermeasures and arrested suspects – who included the Egyptian police. Then on 25 January 1952 a strong British force surrounded the police headquarters at Ismailia at dawn and called upon its occupants to surrender. The minister of the interior ordered them to resist, which they did with great courage until some fifty were dead and many more injured.

  The next day – since known as Black Saturday – a frenzied mob burned the centre of Cairo. Special attention was paid to British property but also to shops, hotels and restaurants owned by foreigners. Responsibility was never clearly established, but the Muslim Brotherhood, the quasi-fascist Young Egypt organization and other militant groups led the mob. The government may have connived in the first attacks but did not expect them to spread so dangerously. The king, who was entertaining senior officers to lunch, did not attempt to intervene. It was not until the evening that regular troops were called in to bring the city under control. The king and the government subsequently blamed each other for the delay.

  The belated move to call in the army was prompted by the very real fear that British troops might intervene from the Canal zone. No Egyptian had forgotten that the British occupation in 1882 had been prompted by riots in Alexandria. In fact the British had a plan to intervene to protect British lives and property, but the rioting had ended before any decision to implement it could be taken.

  The king used the government’s mishandling of the crisis to dismiss Nahas. He recalled his favourite, Ali Maher, but he only lasted five weeks and Egypt then had four different governments in as many weeks. It was increasingly difficult to find anyone with enough authority to form a cabinet.

  The Free Officers realized that the regime was crumbling. Before the crisis, they had planned to move into action in 1954 or 1955. Because they needed a senior officer with a well-known name who would act as their figurehead and give their movement weight and respectability at home and abroad, they had brought in Major-General Muhammad Neguib, who was known to be sympathetic, and he became president of the Free Officers’ Executive Committee in January 1952. But secrecy was imperative. The king detested Neguib and, in the same month, was enraged by his election as president of the Army Officers’ Club against the king’s own nominee. Despite their efforts, the Free Officers knew that the state security police were coming close to uncovering their secret organization. But fortunately the king still believed that the great majority of the army remained loyal, and in July he departed as usual to his summer palace in Alexandria.

  On the night of 22–23 July, army units loyal to Free Officers seized all the key points in the capital, against only token resistance, and Anwar Sadat announced the success of the revolution over Cairo Radio. Convinced that Britain might intervene to save the king, the Free Officers moved swiftly to take control of Alexandria. Nasser overcame the demands of some of his colleagues that Farouk should be put on trial and executed; instead, the king was allowed to abdicate and go into exile with his new queen, Narriman, and their infant son. This enhanced the reputation of the revolutionaries – not least because the ex-king’s behaviour in exile added to the discredit of the monarchy.

  The avuncular, pipe-smoking figure of General Neguib was reassuring to interested foreign powers, which were swift to recognize the new regime. The Free Officers transformed their Executive Committee into a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), with Neguib as its president. It was more than a year before it became apparent to the outside world that the tall, impressive but rather sombre 34-year-old Colonel Nasser was the true leader of the revolution.

  The Free Officers had been planning their revolution for a decade and had a clear concept of what they wanted to do – rid the country of foreign (mainly British) influence, eliminate the power of the landlords and the monarchy, and end the corruption of political life. But they had no developed political ideas, let alone a political programme. A few of them had sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood and a few were Marxists, but the majority could only be described as nationalist. They moved swiftly to consolidate their power. The Wafd remained a threat because, under the old constitution, it could still win any parliamentary election. The leading Wafdist politicians and the ex-king’s cronies were put on trial and, charged with plotting with a foreign power and corruption, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

  In January 1953 the RCC felt able to dissolve all the political parties and confiscate their funds. A provisional constitution was promulgated which placed supreme power for the next three years in the hands of the RCC. From there it was only one short step to the abolition of the monarchy – the Egyptian Republic was officially proclaimed on 18 June 1953. The old Ottoman titles of bey and pasha were abolished. As Neguib commented, ‘The world’s oldest monarchy became, for the time being, the world’s youngest republic.’ Neguib did not regard himself as a figurehead: he felt he had been called upon to command, and he insisted on taking the posts of president and prime minister. Nasser for the time being contented himself with the posts of deputy premier and minister of the interior.

  The RCC adopted one important social political measure in the first weeks after the revolution – land reform. In 1952 less than ½ per cent of the landowners between them owned over one third of all cultivable land, while 72 per cent of cultivators owned less than one feddan (about one acre) each, amounting to only 13 per cent of the land. Before 1952 several Egyptian economists and politicians had made detailed proposals for land reform, some of which had even reached parliament as draft laws before being quietly quashed. The RCC’s agrarian reform limited land holdings to 200 feddans and redistributed the confiscated land to the fellahin in lots of two to five feddans. Legal rents were also drastically reduced. The reform was radical rather than revolutionary, and Marxists called it ‘American-inspired’. Only about 10 per cent of the fellahin benefited from the redistribution. However, because it was generally successful in avoiding drastic falls in output, it served as a model for other developing countries. Above all, it succeeded in its prime objective of reducing the overwhelming political power of the big landowners who had successfully blocked social and political reforms for generations.

  The former regime was not the only threat to the RCC; the principal challenge came from the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists. Of the two the Brotherhood, with its nationwide organization, was much the more formidable and, having played a leading role in undermining the monarchy, it felt it was entitled to at least a share of power in the new regime. But the Brothers were outmanoeuvred and defeated by Nasser, who proved himself a masterly political tactician.

  During 1953 Nasser was involved in a power struggle with both Neguib and the Brotherhood. Although honest and popular, Neguib was far from being a natural revolutionary leader. Conservative in temperament, he felt his office entitled him to exercise authority over the hot-headed young officers in the RCC. He was also politically naïve. Nasser appeared to give way to him, and he allowed himself to be placed in a position in which he seemed to be advocating a return to the pre-revolutionary political system, which was something that the army in particular would not tolerate. In April 1954 Neguib capitulated to Nasser, who became prime minister. Neguib lingered on as president, without any real power.

  Its tendency to violence was the Brotherhood’s undoing. An assassination attempt on Nasser in October 1954 provided grounds for suppressing the organization, and becaus
e Neguib was proved to have connections with the Brotherhood, although it was never suggested that he was implicated in the assassination attempt, he was removed from office and placed under house arrest.

  By the end of 1954 Nasser was in undisputed control of Egypt, and he would remain so until his death in 1970. He was the first true Egyptian to rule the country since the time of the Pharaohs. His father, who came from a poor fellah family of Upper Egypt, had earned the primary school certificate which enabled him to enter the Egyptian white-collar class as a post office official. Nasser had passed through secondary school to enter the military academy when it was opened to the sons of other than pashas and beys as a result of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty. He had shown early his qualities of leadership and his passionate devotion to Egypt. Wide reading of Arab/Islamic and Western history and biography convinced him that the Egyptian people had innate qualities waiting for national redemption after centuries of submission to oppression.

  In 1954 Nasser’s freedom of manoeuvre was greatly enhanced by the recent settling of the two outstanding political questions which had beset Egypt for over fifty years – the British military occupation and the Sudan. Failure to settle the latter had long prevented a solution of the former, and the RCC’s decision on taking power to separate the two went halfway towards resolving both of them.

  The Sudan problem was tackled first, and an Anglo-Egyptian agreement for immediate Sudanese autonomy followed by selfdetermination after three years was reached on 12 February 1953. In a sense both parties were bluffing – neither was able to reject the principle of sudanization and self-government when the other proposed it. The Egyptians hoped and expected that an independent Sudan would opt for union with Egypt. The British were counting on Sudanese elections resulting in a pro-British (and anti-Egyptian) regime under the conservative Umma party. The British were shocked when the pro-Egyptian parties won the elections, but the RCC was equally taken aback when the new Sudanese government decided on complete independence and against union with Egypt. Sudanese independence was declared on 1 January 1956.

  The RCC was bitterly disappointed over the Sudan, but the agreement made it possible to begin negotiations over the British Suez base. Talks continued intermittently throughout 1953 and early 1954. A basic obstacle to the agreement was that Britain still regarded Egypt as part of the Western sphere of interest, but negotiations were made easier by the fact that Egypt was no longer the centre of British Middle East policy – Turkey had joined NATO in the autumn of 1952, and the British joint armed forces HQ had been moved from Suez to Cyprus in December 1952.

  Nasser rejected a British demand to keep 7,000 servicemen in Suez, but he agreed to the reactivation of the base in the event of an outside attack on any Arab state or Turkey. As the negotiations dragged on, he allowed guerrilla attacks on the base area as a means of putting pressure on Britain. Finally, in July 1954, agreement was reached on the basis of a British proposal to evacuate all British troops and maintain the base on a seven-year lease with a cadre of civilians on contract to British firms. In accordance with the agreement, the last British troops left Egypt on 31 March 1956. The Times correspondent wrote on 2 April 1956, ‘Their departure was almost as silent and devoid of ceremony as presumably was the nocturnal disembarkation of General Wolseley’s forces which captured Port Said 74 years ago.’

  At the signing of the agreement in Cairo, Nasser had spoken of a ‘new era of friendly relations…We want to get rid of the hatred in our hearts and start building up our relations with Britain on a solid basis of mutual trust and confidence which has been lacking for the past seventy years.’ These hopes were not fulfilled. The British government – and especially the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who replaced Churchill as prime minister in April 1955 – had developed an antipathy towards Nasser during the frequently acrimonious negotiations over Sudan and the Suez base. As Nasser’s prestige and popularity grew throughout the Middle East, he seemed to present a threat to all British interests in the region. Britain’s hostility was exacerbated by the fact that the Egyptians, despite their noble heritage, were still regarded as one of Lord Cromer’s ‘subject races’ – the leadership of a desert aristocrat such as Ibn Saud was acceptable, but not that of an Egyptian colonel of fellah origins.

  In his little book The Philosophy of the Revolution, published in 1954, Nasser had already shown his awareness of the kind of role that Egypt could play. He wrote of its location at the coincidence of three circles – the Arab Circle, the African Circle and the Islamic Circle. Still in hazy terms, he saw Egypt as the focus of a vast movement of resistance to the imperialism of the West. Initially, he did not see the Arab Circle in terms of pan-Arab unity – indeed, he was suspicious of the Arab League, which he regarded as a fraudulent imperialist conception, and he reduced its influence by removing from office the League’s eloquent pan-Arabist secretary-general, Abdul Rahman Azzam. But he did see the Arab states as potential allies in ending Western hegemony. Unfortunately, the only other independent Arab state which had the makings of a stable autonomous power – Iraq – was led by a man whom Nasser regarded as the imperialist West’s chief ally – Nuri al-Said. To make matters worse, he was a man of real stature and personality. It was this bitter rivalry with Nuri (which was much more than a mere clash of personalities) that was the main factor in involving Egypt deeply in the politics of Arab nationalism.

  Matters came to a head in 1955 with the conclusion of a series of military agreements between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Britain which became known as the Baghdad Pact. The idea of this patently anti-Soviet alliance had originated with the United States, which had dropped it on realizing that the Arabs were much more concerned about Israel than about any Soviet threat. Britain had joined the pact as a means of maintaining some part of its dominant position in the area. Nasser tried every means to prevent Iraq from joining, because he saw the Pact, with its NATO links through Turkey, as an instrument of continued Western domination. But he failed to persuade the indefatigably pro-Western and anti-Soviet Nuri al-Said. The great mass of articulate Arab opinion was on Nasser’s side in this matter, and his influence was enough to prevent Jordan from joining, although the young King Hussein was in favour. But as Nasser’s popularity with the Arabs grew, the hostility he aroused in the West increased.

  Nasser’s horizons were broadening. A crucial influence on his thinking was Pandit Nehru, the figurehead of India’s independence, who visited him in Cairo in February 1955 and agreed with him to oppose all military alliances such as the Baghdad Pact. Nasser also developed a warm admiration for President Tito’s Yugoslavia. While Nehru had succeeded in pursuing an independent non-aligned policy while remaining a member of the British Commonweath, Tito had defied Soviet leadership of the communist bloc (even under Stalin) and accepted American aid without renouncing communism. Nehru, Tito and Nasser would come to be regarded as the founding members of the club of non-aligned states. In April 1955 Nasser headed Egypt’s delegation to the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in Indonesia – an event of immense contemporary importance since it symbolized a concerted attempt by the great majority of the developing world to throw off the hegemony of the white Western nations. The importance of Egypt and its revolution was acknowledged as he was treated as an equal by Asian statesmen such as Nehru and the Chinese premier Chou En-lai. Some of the credit for this was due to his personal qualities – for one so young and inexperienced he acted with remarkable skill and assurance.

  Nasser was well on his way to becoming the hero of Arab nationalism; his picture appeared on display throughout the Arab East. But hero status brought new dangers and responsibilities, for he was beginning to arouse huge expectations among the Arabs. Since he was championing the cause of neutralism in the Cold War, he began to arouse the suspicion and hostility of the United States. At the same time Israel was coming to regard Nasser’s Egypt as its principal external challenge.

  Although Britain appeared to remain the principal Western power with Middle Eastern
interests in the decade following the Second World War, in reality its position was being rapidly overtaken by the United States, for two reasons: the onset of the Cold War and US sponsorship of Israel.

  US involvement began in Iran. At the end of the war both Britain and the United States withdrew their troops from Iran, as stipulated in the 1942 treaty, but the Soviet Union refused for several months to evacuate the northern provinces. When the Soviet army finally withdrew, the Soviet Union sponsored a puppet socialist regime in Azerbaijan which it aimed should secede from Iran and join the Soviet Union. Unexpectedly firm action by the Iranian government suppressed the Azerbaijani separatists, but the Soviet Union continued to exert pressure on Iran through the autonomy movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan and the powerful communist Tudeh Party in Iran. The so-called Truman Doctrine of March 1947, under which the USA offered Greece and Turkey aid (which Britain could no longer provide) to maintain their independence, was soon extended to Iran. In October 1947 the Iranian Majlis plucked up its courage and annulled a highly unpopular Soviet–Iranian agreement for joint exploitation of the oil reserves in the northern provinces.

  Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company remained the principal targets for the powerful force of Iranian nationalism, of which a veteran aristocratic politician, Mohammed Mossadegh, became the spokesman. In 1949 the Iranian government launched an ambitious and much needed seven-year development plan based on the country’s revenues. But whereas between 1944 and 1950 AIOC’s profits had increased more than tenfold, Iran’s revenues had increased only fourfold. Negotiations started with the company in 1948 to increase Iran’s share were frustrated by Mossadegh and his followers in the Majlis, who insisted on Iran’s right to regain control over the country’s principal natural resource. Public opinion was so roused that in May 1951 the young shah was forced to appoint Mossadegh as prime minister and give his assent to a bill nationalizing the Iranian oil industry.