Gladstone had always condemned interference in Egyptian affairs. “Our first sight of Egypt,” he had warned in 1877, “be it by larceny or be it by emption, will be the almost certain egg of a North African Empire that will grow and grow…till we finally join hands across the Equator with Natal and Cape Town.”8
Although the “Bulgarian Horrors” had convinced Gladstone that Islam was “radically incapable of establishing a good or tolerable government over civilized and Christian races,” he was wary of intruding into the Islamic world. “The susceptibilities which we might offend in Egypt are rational and just. For very many centuries she has been inhabited by a Mohammedan community. That community has always been governed by Mohammedan influences and powers.” It also seemed immoral. Conscience demanded that, like any other people, the Egyptians be encouraged to reach “the ends of political society, as they understand them,” and without foreign interference.9
At the same time, Gladstone invested heavily in the Egyptian economy. In 1875, he bought Egyptian loan stocks worth £25,000, in 1878 £5,000, and in 1879 he speculated a further £15,000. By December 1881, Gladstone owned Egyptian stock with a paper value of £51,000. Apart from affecting Britain’s global position, his Egyptian policy would directly affect his holdings, then underperforming with a market value of only £40,567. The Gladstonian conscience remained mute on this conflict of interest. It remained a hidden imperfection, like the middle finger of his left hand, mutilated in a shooting accident, and always covered in public by gloves, hats, and tailored leather fingerstalls.10
“We shall be in a scrape, if we are not prepared with any policy,” his foreign secretary Lord Granville warned. “Ought we to have a Cabinet?”
Chubby and deaf, with a halo of white curls that made him resemble a debauched cherub, “Pussy” Granville was a Whig traditionalist with a Mayfair mansion and an aristocratic style. Experience had proven that success came from “dawdling matters out” rather than jumping in. Egypt perplexed him. “I am not prepared to propose anything,” he admitted to Gladstone.11
Nor did Gladstone want to suggest a policy. He felt that he lacked “information on the merits of the quarrel,” and rightly. The British press gave a very partial view of Egyptian affairs. Through its Cairo correspondent Moberley Bell, the Times reported Egyptian politics as a series of share issues, while the Cairo stringer for the Pall Mall Gazette was Sir Auckland Colvin of the Dual Control. At the Foreign Office, Lord Granville received a similarly narrow view. Sir Edward Malet, the British consul at Cairo, believed the reformers were no threat to British interest. Malet’s information about Urabi came from his regular tennis game with Wilfrid Blunt on the court in the consulate garden, and Blunt painted Urabi in the colors of European liberalism. In the absence of a dissenting impression, Gladstone and Granville agreed that the most important principle was to maintain amiable relations with France, the other Dual Controller, and its new premier, Leon Gambetta.12
The lack of a British response to the crisis in Egypt allowed France to dictate Dual Control policy. In November 1881, Gambetta had taken office facing revolts in Tunisia and Algeria. He attributed them not to burgeoning nationalism, but to pan-Islamic agitation fomented by Sultan Abdul HamidII. French prestige, still deflated after defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1871, forbade concessions to Muslim nationalists in North Africa. French and British gunboats should be sent to Alexandria at once, and preparations made for a joint Military Control that would introduce “order and discipline” to the Egyptian army.13
“They will propose joint occupation, which is very awkward,” Granville warned Gladstone. Granville managed to talk Gambetta down to issuing a “Joint Note” to the Egyptian nationalists: a warning that any move concerning the status of the khedive, the Dual Control, and the budget would be met with force. He felt sure that this would call the Egyptians’ bluff. If the Egyptians stayed in line, it did not matter that Gambetta believed the Joint Note was a preamble to annexation.14
Gambetta’s draft of the Joint Note reached London on New Year’s Day, 1882. The same morning, the Times published Urabi’s manifesto. The sudden appearance of modern nationalism in Muslim Egypt surprised Gladstone. The “very ideas” of a national sentiment and a national party seemed “quite incompatible” with the Egyptian people. “How it has come up, I do not know. Most of all is the case strange if the standing army has reared it. There, however, it seems to be.” Gladstone believed that everyone had the right to be like him, and the defender of oppressed minorities could not fail this first test of his foreign policy. “Egypt for the Egyptians is the sentiment to which I should wish to give scope; and could it prevail it would, I think, be the best, the only good solution of the Egyptian Question.”15
Yet in the same note to Granville, Gladstone endorsed Gambetta’s draft for the Joint Note. Conscience also commanded respect for the “public law” of the “Anglo-French concert,” not forgetting “the bondholders’ interests.” So long as the National Party recognized these limits, there would be no need for gunboats, let alone annexation. Gladstone believed that the Joint Note would remain what Granville had intended it to be, a rhetorical ploy.16
Five days later, the Joint Note reached the Cairo consulate. Sir Edward Malet realized that the Egyptian rebels would not interpret the Note’s threat of an Anglo-French invasion as mere rhetoric.
“They will take it as a declaration of war,” Malet warned Wilfrid Blunt. He asked Blunt to go to his friend Colonel Urabi and convince him of Britain’s goodwill. Blunt found Urabi at his desk in the War Ministry, his face “like a thunder cloud” and “a peculiar gleam” in his eye.17
“It is the language of menace,” Urabi raged, “a menace to our liberties.” He began to shout. “Let them come! Every man, woman and child in Egypt will fight them!”18
“WHAT A BLUNDER!” said Sharif Pasha as he read the Note.19
Sharif Pasha had done his utmost to placate the French and British. He had excluded the colonels and the clerics from his government. He had stacked the Chamber of Notables with mild Turks. His draft of a Basic Law for the constitution had prioritized debt repayment over liberty. Now, caught between Blunt, Urabi, and Abdu’s radical appeal to the British, and the threat of the Joint Note, Sharif lost the center ground. The Joint Note had convinced even Sharif’s tame notables that, just as France had annexed Tunisia, so Britain was about to annex Egypt. Led by Urabi’s patron Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, a majority of the notables demanded that the proposed Basic Law recover full control of Egypt’s finances. Sharif Pasha did not want to head a government that breached Egypt’s international obligations. He resigned.
“I have offered them a constitution which is good enough for them, and if they are not content with it, they must do without one,” he explained to Blunt.20
“For many days after this, I hardly heard anything from my friends but the language of pan-Islamism,” Blunt noted, not without satisfaction.21
For their new leader, the notables chose Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, whose surname meant “the powder works.” A Turkish aristocrat with ambitions as a poet, al-Barudi was a sensualist who adored women, wine, and his own family tree. While Urabi drew on koranic schooling and an Arabic biography of Napoleon, al-Barudi read in French, mixing the Collected Works of Montesquieu and The Dictionary of Politics with smut like Mysteries of the Harem and The Thousand and One Nights of Paris. By adopting Urabi and the colonels, he hoped to gain the further pleasure of power. He made Urabi a major general, and appointed him minister for war. He hired and promoted hundreds more Egyptian officers and filled his new government with Egyptians. But he took care not to invite European gunboats to Alexandria. Promising to honor Egypt’s debt schedules, al-Barudi envisioned a constitution little different from Sharif Pasha’s.22
The subtleties of al-Barudi’s policy did not reach London and Paris. Urabi spoke no languages other than Arabic and Turkish, and both he and al-Barudi negotiated with Britain and France only through local intermediaries. The Dual
Controllers, the consuls, and the freelance intriguer Wilfrid Blunt all skewed their reports to suit their prejudices. Meanwhile, the French government saw the rise of al-Barudi and Urabi as a military coup, and the British government saw the issue in terms of their French alliance. These confusions pushed al-Barudi and Urabi toward Ottoman Turkey as their only possible protector. Hoping to manipulate Egypt back into the Ottoman orbit, Sultan Abdul Hamid II encouraged them. He promoted Urabi to brigadier general and pasha.
To complete the chaos, Gambetta, who had instigated the Joint Note, fell from office within weeks of its dispatch. His successor was Charles de Freycinet, nicknamed “The White Mouse” for his caution. De Freycinet could not afford to back down on Gambetta’s threat to Egypt, but nor did he want to antagonize the French chamber by calling a vote on a military expedition. So he insisted that Britain and France stand by the Joint Note, knowing that the preponderance of British interest in Egypt would force Britain to take the lead.
In London, Gladstone and Granville fumbled for a response. While they had pondered the terms of an Egyptian constitution, the international order had crumbled.
“Smouldering fires in Egypt,” warned the Pall Mall Gazette. 23
“It would be childish to discuss the pattern of a carpet when the house in which it was laid down was in flames,” warned de Freycinet.
Sir Auckland Colvin extended the metaphor. “The house is tumbling about our ears,” he warned from Cairo, “and the moment is not propitious for debating whether we would like to add another storey to it.” Egypt, he said, was under “military despotism.” The Dual Control had ceased to exist.24
The Anglo-French duo having failed, Gladstone attempted to internationalize the problem by constructing various trios and quartets from the Concert. Overcoming his revulsion for Turkey, the author of Bulgarian Horrors proposed that Turkish troops be sent to Egypt. The sultan bristled that before he could address this request, Britain and France must apologize for issuing the Joint Note without consulting him. Granville humbly apologized, but Abdul Hamid II refused to send troops anyway: He had no desire to stop the Egyptian drift toward Turkey. Nor would he permit an internationalized solution, refusing a French request that he invite the Concert to an emergency conference at Constantinople. He did, however, agree to send a Turkish general to reason with the rebels, and that was because it seemed an invitation to turn events in his favor.
“The Sultan is intensely false and fraudulent,” Gladstone complained, “and tries to work everything against us.”25
While the sultan would not let Gladstone off the hook by sending troops, the French would not allow him to negotiate with the rebels. In early May, the option of retreat closed, too. In a demonstration of the link between domestic and foreign policies, and the power of terrorism, Gladstone’s Egyptian policy became hostage to his Irish policy.
Gladstone had sent two emissaries to Ireland to negotiate with the Fenian nationalists. In Dublin on May 6, 1882, members of a paramilitary splinter group called the Invincibles murdered them with surgical knives in broad daylight at the gates of Phoenix Park, the seat of British authority. One of the dead was Thomas Burke, the undersecretary for Ireland. The other was Lord Frederick Cavendish, brother of the secretary for war, Lord Hartington, and Gladstone’s nephew by marriage. The “Phoenix Park Murders” hardened attitudes in the cabinet. Hartington insisted that there be no negotiation with terrorists. Gladstone had to choose between abandoning his Irish policy or breaking up his cabinet. He chose to keep his cabinet. Egyptian policy followed suit: consensus in the cabinet, and a tough policy.
The only option was to overthrow the Nationalist government, replace it with a reliable puppet government, and then withdraw. The French insisted on sending a joint fleet. Gladstone tried to internationalize that, too, but the French foreign minister Tissot blocked him. On May 13, Gladstone caved in. From the Royal Navy base at Suda Bay in Crete, the fat, fierce admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, known as “The Swell of the Ocean,” set forth.26
“DO NOT FEAR THE SHIPS,” Blunt blithely cabled Urabi. “No intervention.”27
Blunt interpreted Gladstone’s vagueness as an endorsement of the Egyptian revolution. Misinformed and inexperienced, Urabi misplayed his hand. While Gladstone drifted into war and Seymour steamed south, Urabi clumsily provided a pretext for intervention. He made a play for total power.
As soon as Urabi took control of the War Ministry, he turned the old policies of discrimination on the Turkish elite. He rehired unemployed native officers, sacked over seven hundred Turks, and sent dozens more to the Sudanese outposts. In protest, some of the remaining Turkish officers left the country and defected to the sultan. Not long after this purge, the Urabists discovered a plot to poison Abd el-Al, head of the Sudanese regiment. Urabi detected a Turkish conspiracy against his takeover of the army, apparently funded by ex-khedive Ismail. He arrested forty Turkish officers, among them his old enemy, Osman Rifki Pasha. By the end of April, when the mass courts-martial began, Urabi was sleeping in the Abdin barracks to avoid assassination, and Abd el-Al’s mother was keeping his drinking water under lock and key. The courts convicted all forty officers of treason, stripped them of their ranks, and sentenced them to exile in the Sudan.
The sentences reached Khedive Tawfik for approval. Tawfik realized that the purging of the Turkish officers turned him into the mascot of a native revolution. Although the state still functioned, it had undergone a military coup. Foreign intervention was his only hope. Guided by Sir Edward Malet, he refused to endorse the sentences and put them to the vote in the Chamber of Notables. The Turkish majority among the notables also sensed that al-Barudi and Urabi were turning Egypt into a dictatorship, and they voted down the sentences. The khedive, in genuine fear of his life, was now in a standoff with his own army.
Next, a cable arrived from London, warning that British and French warships were on their way to Alexandria, and that any disorder in Egypt would bring intervention. Al-Barudi and Urabi tendered their resignations, but Tawfik refused to accept them. Neither side wanted to be responsible for what happened when the gunboats arrived. The rebel ministers decided to stay in office. If war was inevitable, it made more sense to fight it from a position of strength.
ON THE MORNING of May 19, 1882, Urabi’s sentries on the walls of Alexandria reported that a British ironclad had anchored outside the harbor. The next morning, a French warship appeared. One stream of Alexandrians fled the city, and another converged on Urabi’s house. All order collapsed.
The British and French consuls issued a “Dual Note”: The al-Barudi government must resign, all troops must withdraw to the countryside, and Urabi must go into exile. The entire government resigned. Tawfik sent for Sharif Pasha, but Sharif refused: It did not seem possible to assemble a new government without the army’s involvement. Then the army officers weighed in with a telegram refusing to accept Urabi’s resignation. More worried by rifles at Cairo than battleships at Alexandria, Tawfik turned around and requested Urabi to return.
Urabi accepted. He assured the consuls that he was in charge, that there would be no shooting, that Egypt still honored its sultan and its debts. At the same time, he fortified the walls of Alexandria. Meanwhile, Tawfik prepared for civil war. Thousands of his Bedouin supporters flooded into Alexandria. Omar Lutfi Pasha, Alexandria’s pro-Tawfik police chief, bought up all available stocks of naboots—the wooden clubs used by the city’s night watchmen—and distributed them among the Bedouin and the poor Arabs of the city. Stocking up with guns and supplies, Alexandria’s Europeans barricaded their homes.
On June 8, the sultan dropped two sparks into the Egyptian tinderbox. Abdul Hamid II sent two emissaries, one to persuade and the other to coerce the rebels into the Ottoman camp. The first was Sheikh Ahmed Assad, one of the pan-Islamists Abdul Hamid collected at Constantinople as a bulwark against Arab secessionism. Sheikh Assad promised Urabi and the al-Azhar scholars that the sultan would protect the Islamic aspect of their nationalism.
In return, Urabi assured the sultan of his loyalty, his willingness to accept Tawfik’s great-uncle Halim as the new khedive, and that he was “fighting for Islamic unity, and was prepared to sacrifice his life.”28
The second was the notorious general Dervish Pasha. In Albania, Dervish had tied pairs of rebel prisoners back to back, executing one and leaving the other roped to a corpse. “Dervish is a man of iron,” chortled the Pall Mall Gazette. “And Arabi may well quail before his eye. One saucy word and his head will roll upon the carpet.”29
Tawfik greeted Dervish Pasha with fifty thousand pounds in baksheesh and jewels worth twenty-five thousand pounds. The Nationalists greeted him with an ovation, “Allah give victory to the Sultan! The note? Reject it, reject it!”30
Neither swayed Dervish. He had come to raise the tension in the sultan’s favor. Again, Urabi provided the pretext. He boasted to Dervish Pasha that for the previous four years, he had been “preparing an Islamic league, from the depths of Africa to the extremities of India.” In Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, the Sudan, and “other distant countries,” members of this secret “Islamic union” were poised to rebel in harmony with the Egyptians. This claim, soaked in the flammable visions of Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani, was as much a threat to the sultan’s caliphate as to European influence. The flexible virtues of Pan-Islamism attacked the Ottoman Empire as easily as they validated it.31
Dervish ordered Urabi to Constantinople, but Urabi refused to go. To counteract Mohammed Abdu and his followers, Dervish toured the mosques of Cairo, denouncing the radical sheikhs for threatening the interests of the sultan-caliph. His campaign backfired. Whipped up by Afghani’s protégé Abdullah Nadim, thousands of al-Azhar students rioted in the streets. The Urabists rallied around their leader. Mohammed Abdu devised a Masonic-style oath of loyalty: If they abandoned Urabi to exile, their throats would be cut, their tongues and hearts removed. More conventional but more radical, Sheikh el-Ullaish, the head of al-Azhar, issued a fatwa against Tawfik. The khedive had sinned against Islam by inviting a Christian fleet into an Islamic land.32
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