Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  Also by Dominic Green

  The Double Life of Doctor Lopez:

  Spies, Shakespeare & the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I

  FREE PRESS

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  Copyright © 2007 by Dominic Green

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006049669

  ISBN: 0-7432-9895-0

  978-0-7432-9895-7

  All photos are from the author’s collection except:

  16, 17: Taken by Italian photographers L. Fiorillo and P. Sebah immediately after the bombardment (Album 331, Vol. 31 of the Lady Anna Brassey Collection); reproduced by permission of Huntington Library Archives, San Marino, California 18, 32, 36: From the Sudan Archive, Durham University 25: Courtesy of Leeds City Art Gallery 33: From the Hulton Archive, reproduced by permission of Getty Images

  All maps courtesy of Chris Robinson

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To my aunt and uncle, Roberta and Terence Conoley,

  who first sparked my interest in Egypt.

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue: Port Said, 1869

  1 Ismail’s Dream: 1869-73

  2 The Engineer: 1873-79

  3 God’s Diplomacy: 1879-81

  4 The Redeemer: 1881-82

  5 Egypt for the Egyptians! 1882

  6 The Wind and the Whirlwind: 1883

  7 The Unrolling of the Scroll: 1884

  8 Armies of God: 1885

  9 The New Caliphate: 1885-89

  10 Gladstone’s Egg: 1889-96

  11 The House of War: 1896-99

  Epilogue: 1899

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  IN A MAJOR ARAB NATION, A SECULAR TYRANNY is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers.

  Caught between interventionists at home and radical Islam abroad, a prime minister flounders. His ministers betray him, his alliances fall apart, and a runaway general makes policy in the field. As the media accuse Western soldiers of barbarity and a region slides into chaos, the Armies of God clash on an ancient river, and an accidental empire arises.

  This is not the Middle East in the twenty-first century.

  It is Africa in the nineteenth century, when the River Nile became the setting for the first major encounter between the West and Islam in the modern era. This human and religious drama shaped our world, and prefigured the crises of our time.

  In an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs, and Africans, three empires rose in the space of thirty years.

  The first, the plaything of an Egyptian tyrant, fell to European meddling and Arab nationalism. The second, an apocalyptic Islamic fantasy led by a Muslim messiah, fell to European expansion in Africa. The third, the British Empire, arrived in a flurry of humanitarian concern, but endured through brutal force

  Prologue

  Port Said, 1869

  From the pier of Port Said, a forty-foot statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps directs shipping into the Suez Canal.

  ON THE MORNING OF November 17, 1869, Africa became an island. A modern waterway severed the sandy isthmus between Africa and Asia, mingling the waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. From that day, maps would show that the two continents lay 250 feet apart, and shipping schedules would announce that Britain had moved more than four thousand miles closer to India. With fanfares, fireworks, and a great expenditure of borrowed money and Egyptian lives, the Suez Canal was open.

  At Port Said on the Mediterranean, sixty ships from over a dozen nations sheltered in the largest artificial harbor yet built, waiting for the signal to enter the Canal. To the triumphal piping of military bands, the guests of honor took their seats in the viewing stands: the host, Khedive Ismail of Egypt, and his guest of honor, Empress Eugenie of France; the bishop of Jerusalem and the sharif of Mecca; the emperor of Austria-Hungary and the prince of Prussia; the empress’s Catholic confessor and the sheikh of al-Azhar, the Islamic world’s premier university; and all flanked by complementary battalions of European consuls and Egyptian ministers.

  A sea of smaller fry washed around the feet of the stands. In the scrum on the quayside, the Turkish fez mingled with the spiked Prussian helmet, the frock coat with the jellaba, the veil with the parasol. French financiers elbowed for room with the international crust of the Ottoman Empire—Greek, Armenian, and Jewish businessmen from Alexandria, Turkish cotton magnates, Coptic army officers—and the mute extras of Egyptian society, the Arab peasant farmers and African slaves who in the chaos wandered onto center stage.

  The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps waited amid the robes, plumes, and uniforms in his dark business suit. This was the culmination of his fifteen years’ struggle against sand, politicians, and bankers. No obstacle of diplomacy or geology had been too great for de Lesseps’s calm mania. He had burrowed around or dynamited through every obstacle. Displacing the opposition of the Turkish sultan and the British prime minister like so much wet sand and bedrock, he raised diplomatic support and funding in France, romancing Emperor Napoleon III with a mirage of empire, and the French public with a share flotation that promised a stake in the global economy to the smallest investor. He had supervised every detail, devising elaborate financing deals that tied both France and the Egyptian government to his Suez Canal Company, designing mechanical diggers when the shovels of his Egyptian laborers proved useless against the water table, even planning the guest lists and firework displays for the opening festivities.

  Now he waited fretfully. The bottom of the Canal was only seventy-two feet deep and twenty-six feet wide. Protocol dictated that the first ship to enter should be the Eagle, Empress Eugenie’s broad and ungainly yacht, sixty feet in the beam and three hundred feet long. In a trial run the previous day, a sprightlier vessel from the Egyptian navy had run aground. To remove it before the guests arrived, de Lesseps had blown it up. An accident now meant economic and diplomatic catastrophe. The eyes of the world were on the Suez Canal.

  AT THE JUNCTION of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Canal was intended as a unifier of civilizations, a conduit for the modern obsessions of trade and transit. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the global economy boomed. In Europe and America, new machines and mass production created an unstoppable, uncontrollable economic revolution that turned rural peasants into urban factory hands. A machine pulse raced across the world, girdling the seas with coal-fired, iron-hulled steamers, crossing continents and borders with smelted rivulets of railway tracks, bounding immensities of land and water with the electric cables of the telegraph. It created a global civilization, based on Western technology and speaking English or French. “We are capable of doing anything,” Queen Victoria marveled after visiting the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851.1

  This was the spirit of the age: industrial potency and runaway optimism. In France, the Saint-Simonians, a utopian group of technological cultists whose adherents included Ferdinand de Lesseps, prophesied that the convergence of technology, trade, and communication must culminate in the triumph of liberal, mercantile civilization. Free Trade, the British ideologue Richard Cobden had predicted, was “God’s diplomacy,” its mutual dependencies the best guarantee against war. Between the Great
Exhibition of 1851 and the opening of the Suez Canal, this vision leaped into reality. Innovation in transport and communications opened new sources of raw materials, and new markets for finished factory goods. In 1840 the major nations of the world had exchanged annually 20 million tons of seaborne merchandise; by 1869 the figure had more than quadrupled to 88 million tons. The volume of coal shipped rose from 1.4 million to 31 million tons; of iron from 1 million to 6 million tons; of grain from 2 million to 11 million tons; with a further 1.4 million tons shipped of a commodity new to international trade, petroleum.

  Britain, the most industrialized economy, saw a manifold increase in its exchanges with the rest of the world. Its earnings from exports to the Ottoman and Persian empires rose from £3.5 million in 1848 to £15 million in 1869. Integrating India into the global economy through the construction of a domestic railway system that allowed the export of cash crops and the distribution of imported goods, Britain’s exports to its most profitable possession grew from £5 million in 1848 to over £20 million.2

  As communication and travel accelerated, the world shrank. In 1869 the telegraphic system between Britain and India generated nearly half a million telegrams. Earlier that year, American engineers had connected the coasts of America with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Now the path to the East was open. Optimism and share prices ran high, and expectation rippled out from Suez. The European economies had to reach abroad to the south and east in order to grow. The Canal would allow the raw materials of the East to flow more quickly and cheaply to the factories of Europe, whose finished goods would wash back east in a great tide of civilization and profit. Just as the flooding of the Nile had fed ancient Egypt, so the transit tolls of the Canal would be the commercial artery of modern Egypt. Progress, the presiding deity of the age, would follow in the wake of the ships taking the Suez shortcut.3

  On the quayside at Port Said the military bands segued into a three-part harmony of religious platitudes. First a Muslim imam claimed the Canal for a new, modern Egypt. Then the bishop of Jerusalem bestowed the blessings of Greek Orthodoxy on the Canal’s commercial aspirations. Lastly Father Marie-Bernard Bauer, Catholic confessor to the Empress Eugenie, closed the service with the hope that Christianity and Islam, two faiths with common roots and a history of violent competition, might be reconciled in the Canal’s union of “splendid Orient and marvellous Occident.”

  “Today, two worlds are made one,” he announced. “Today is a great festival for all of humanity. Bless this new highway. Make of this Canal not only a passage to universal prosperity, but make it a royal road of peace and justice; of the light, and the eternal truth.”4

  The international flotilla anchored beyond the breakwater issued a thunderous broadside and lined up behind Empress Eugenie’s Eagle and Khedive Ismail’s Mahroussah. Edging into the Canal without accident, they began their lurid progress. Narrow and shallow but perfectly executed, the Canal ran south from the new city of Port Said, down through the desert to the Bitter Lakes and another new city, Ismailia, and into the Red Sea at the port of Suez.

  Halfway down the Canal, the fleet paused at Ismailia for a wild carnival. Fire-eaters and acrobats vied with the “Whirling Dervish” dances of Sufi ecstatics and the horseback shooting competitions of the thousands of curious Bedouin who had camped outside the city. That night the flicker of Chinese lanterns lit the sandy road to the khedive’s new palace. The invited and uninvited elbowed for room at the buffet, admired a midnight firework display, and watched the khedive and empress waltz to Leaving for Syria, a romantic legacy of the Napoleonic age.

  The fleet left for Suez the next day, where its triumphal arrival fired off another round of theatricals and pyrotechnics. It took days for the stragglers to return north. Those who could not squeeze onto the express train to Cairo were left stranded by the Red Sea, and missed a final ball at Cairo and horse races at the Pyramids. Khedive Ismail paid for everything. The hawkers handing out Turkish coffee to rally the flagging revellers, the café proprietors offering honeyed tobacco and nargila pipes when they had to sit down, and the hoteliers in whose rooms they collapsed, all sent their invoices to Ismail’s Coptic accountants at Cairo.

  The Canal opened for business. De Lesseps married a woman a third his age and started work on his idea for a canal at Panama. The guests returned to the courts and counting houses of Europe, aware that as geography had changed, politics must follow. The Canal was a new artery for the global economy, but would it bring peace and prosperity? Would the religious harmony and internationalist optimism of its opening ceremonies fade with the fanfares? And what would happen when the new age of nation-states and technological innovation met the old order of faith and autocracy?

  FROM HIS PALACE on the Bosphorus, Sultan Abdul Aziz ruled over a million square miles of Africa, Europe, and Asia: from Cairo in the west to Baghdad in the east, from the Balkan foothills in the north to the rocky coasts of the Arabian peninsula in the south. Thirty-third in a lineage of Ottoman autocrats, warriors, and maniacs that reached back six centuries, Abdul Aziz was also the twenty-sixth Ottoman khalifa, the “successor” of Allah and his Prophet. In the Islamic blend of temporal and religious authority, the sultan was the Commander of the Faithful, the spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims, and the guardian of the Arabian holy places of Mecca and Medina.

  He was also the world’s largest absentee landlord. Rotten with corruption, conservatism, and xenophobia, his empire crumbled like a neglected summer palace. European exports besieged his ports, European weapons battered his armies, European loans mortgaged his future, and the European virus of nationalism nibbled at his borders. In 1683, a Turkish army had laid siege to the gates of Vienna, and been repulsed by a European coalition using modern arms and logistics. Now, less than two centuries later, another European coalition had carved a gate to the East through the geographic center of the Ottoman Empire, and at the invitation of the rebellious khedive of Ottoman Egypt.

  The sultan was powerless to resist. The emperor whose motto was “The Ever Victorious,” whose forebears had terrorized half of Europe, was reduced to junior membership of the Great Powers, as the Europeans now styled themselves. They still addressed him as the Sublime Porte—after the building that housed his foreign ministry—but this was an exotic sham. Among themselves, they called Turkey the Sick Man of Europe, and his treatment the “Eastern Question”: to keep him alive for profit or to finish him off for his legacy?

  The Russians, first to diagnose his condition, wanted to kill him for a warm-water port on the Black Sea and access to the Mediterranean. The Austrians and the Italians wanted to preserve him, mainly to block the Russians. The French, who had precipitated his terminal illness, sustained him in order to be the sole beneficiaries of his will. And the British, whose “Overland Route” to their Indian empire passed through Turkish territory, appointed themselves the guardians of his sickbed. To Abdul Aziz, the Suez Canal was a Western bridgehead in the heart of his empire, but it was also an opportunity. If he played the Europeans against each other, he might yet recover Egypt.

  IT WAS IN EGYPT that the encounter between rising West and declining East would play out with the most spectacular results. In 1798, Napoleon had broken the Ottoman hold on Egypt. British and Turkish troops swiftly displaced him, but the cultural impact endured. The Napoleonic blueprint for the modern state remained in Egypt: an army, a bureaucracy, and the printing press that Napoleon had stolen from the Vatican. Exploiting the chaos, Mehmet Ali, an Albanian tobacco dealer turned Turkish mercenary, forced the sultan to appoint him pasha of Egypt. Encouraged by France, Ali set up an efficient despotism. He massacred the Mameluke aristocracy, imported French technical experts, and sent batches of his subjects to Paris for training.

  Ali needed men and money for his struggle against the sultan. So he turned south to Bilad al-Sudan, the “Land of the Blacks.” The black animists of the Sudan had always been Egypt’s reservoir of human material, a resource to be exploited li
ke gold, ivory, and ostrich feathers. In the pattern of his twin inheritances, Ali combined the Ottoman model of military slavery with the European model of industrial slavery. Sudanese slaves labored on his cotton plantations, campaigned in his army, and passed through the giant slave market at Cairo.

  When Ali’s troops reached the Turkish border, the Great Powers pushed him back. His consolation was the hereditary governorship of Egypt. He had the dynasty he wanted, but not the empire he desired. Increasingly senile, and haunted in his clear moments by the ghosts of his victims, he faded with his dreams. When European tourists visited Ali at the Cairo Citadel, they found him sitting in dingy candlelight like a mangy lion, one eye “incessantly rolling about.”5

  Ali’s heirs struggled to escape the cage of international consensus. The first, Abbas Pasha, was a portly, paranoid xenophobe who hid in a palace outside Cairo with a menagerie of dogs, horses, peacocks, and bodyguards, entertaining himself with mad tyrannies. It was rumored that when he caught a harem slave smoking, he had her lips sewn together, that he buried men alive in the brickwork of his palace, and that he was “notoriously addicted” to “filthy sensualities.” When Gustave Flaubert visited Abbas’s palace in 1850, he found the coffee “execrable,” the bodyguards dressed like “servants supplied by a caterer,” and Abbas “a moron, almost a mental case.” In his French-run military hospital, an entire ward was filled with syphilitic bodyguards. “Several have it in the arse.”6

  In 1854, two of Abbas’s eunuchs strangled him in his sleep. His uncle Mehmet Said succeeded him. Said had been educated in Europe. French became the language of the court, the frock coat replaced the kaftan, and dinner ended with brandy and cigars. He was so tame to European interests that he trembled in the presence of the French consul. To oblige British travelers en route to India, he built a railway between Alexandria and Suez. To oblige the French, he agreed to de Lesseps’s Suez Canal proposal at ruinous terms. Egypt would provide the labor, but it would receive only 15 percent of the profits, and would cede the land on the Canal’s banks; irrigated by the Canal, these sand dunes would soon become some of the most expensive agricultural land in the world. To oblige Britain and France, Said took huge loans from foreign banks. In 1863, he bequeathed to his nephew Ismail a 40 percent stake in an unfinished Canal, a revenue of £3.5 million, and a debt of £9 million.7