Arabs (33 page)

The British and French governments refused to recognize the Syrian declaration of independence. The British looked the other way as the French prepared to occupy
Damascus and unseat their wartime ally, Amir—now King—Faysal. Increasingly isolated at home for his failure to deliver on his promises of independence, Faysal could only rally a small band of supporters to confront the French army as it advanced from Lebanon toward Syria. The Damascenes did not believe Faysal’s cause worth dying for.

At dawn on July 24, 1920, a group of 2,000 Arab volunteers assembled at an isolated caravansary named Khan Maysalun, in a mountain pass on the road from Beirut to Damascus. They faced a bizarre column of colonial soldiers in French uniforms: Algerians, Moroccans, and Senegalese troops under French commanders sent to secure French rule in Syria. It was a reflection of the power of the French Empire that Arab Muslim soldiers from its North African colonies were willing to serve their colonial masters against Arab Muslim irregulars in Syria. One of the members of the provisional Syrian government, and a committed Arab Nationalist, Sati al-Husri, recorded his memories of the “day of Maysalun” as he followed events from Damascus:

French forces swept past the defenders at Maysalun to enter Damascus, marking the start of an unhappy colonial occupation that would last twenty-six years. Yet the symbolic significance of Maysalun spread far beyond the frontiers of Syria. To the Arabs, this small battle represented the betrayal of Britain’s wartime promises, the bankruptcy of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s vision of national self-determination, and the triumph of British and French colonial self-interest over the hopes and aspirations of millions of Arabs. Maysalun was equated with original sin, when the Europeans imposed their state system on the Middle East, dividing a people who aspired to unity and placing them under foreign rule against their will. The new Arab states and boundaries of the postwar settlement proved remarkably enduring. So too did the problems they engendered.

N
ationalist politicians in Egypt also believed they could achieve their independence from Britain at the Paris Peace Conference. Mislead by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Egyptian political establishment thought that Paris would inaugurate
a new world order. They believed the age of empire would be replaced by a new community of nations created through the exercise of national self-determination. And, like Britain’s Hashemite allies, the Egyptians believed they had earned their independence after the wartime hardship they had suffered for Britain.

Following thirty-six years of British rule, the First World War had served only to entrench Britain’s imperial presence in Egypt. The British unilaterally declared Egypt a protectorate in December 1914, deposing the reigning khedive Abbas II for having “adhered to the King’s enemies” (he was in Istanbul at the time). As Egypt was no longer an Ottoman vassal state, its ruler was no longer a viceroy. The deposed khedive was replaced by his uncle, Husayn Kamil, the eldest member of the line of Muhammad ’Ali, with the new title of sultan. The British hoped to undermine the influence of the Ottoman sultan by promoting the Egyptian sultan, just as they hoped Sharif Husayn’s call for a revolt against the Ottomans would undermine the sultan’s call to jihad against Britain and France. This stratagem had little impact on Muslims in Egypt or the broader Muslim community, who continued to revere the Ottoman sultan in his role as caliph, or leader of the global Islamic community.

Once war began, the burden of Egypt’s support for the British fell most heavily on the working people of Egypt. Crops were requisitioned for the war effort, and peasants were recruited to serve in labor teams to provide logistical support on the western front. Inflation and shortage of goods had reduced living standards for all, and many Egyptians were left impoverished. Cairo and Alexandria were flooded with British and Commonwealth soldiers who assembled and trained in Egypt before being dispatched to conflict in Gallipoli and Palestine. The flood of soldiers raised tensions with the local population, who believed that the presence of more Britons inevitably meant less independence.

As the war drew to a close, Woodrow Wilson’s message of national self-determination fell on fertile ground in the Nile Valley. The Egyptians believed that through their many contributions to a war not of their making, they had earned the right of self-determination. On November 13, 1918, only two days after the armistice ending the First World War, a group of respected Egyptian political figures called on the British high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, to demand complete independence for their country. The group was headed by Sa’d Zaghlul, the Azhar-trained follower of Muhammad Abduh who served as minister of education and vice president of the Egyptian Legislative Assembly. Zaghlul, a member of the prewar People’s Party, had emerged as the leader of the nationalist opposition to the British presence in Egypt. He was accompanied by two other nationalists, Abd al-Aziz Fahmi and Ali Sha’rawi.

Wingate received the men, heard their request, and refused out of hand. Not only were the Egyptians forbidden to send a delegation to Paris to press their claim before the Peace Conference, but he refused to recognize Zaghlul’s right to speak
on behalf of Egyptian national aspirations. After all, no one had elected Zaghlul to be Egypt’s spokesman.

The Egyptian delegation did not take Wingate’s refusal sitting down. Zaghlul and his colleagues left the High Commission and promptly set about securing their mandate to speak on behalf of Egyptian national aspirations. They drafted a petition asking that Zaghlul and his delegation be allowed to travel to Paris and present Egypt’s case before the Peace Conference as Amir Faysal was doing for Syria. Activists traveled across the whole of Egypt securing signatures. In spite of official obstruction by British officials and the confiscation of signed copies of the petition, the nationalists succeeded in gathering impressive support for Zaghlul’s movement. Copies of the petition were sent to local elected bodies, provincial councils, and other notables, and in a short time, hundreds of thousands of signatures poured in.
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People across Egypt rallied to Sa’d Zaghlul’s cause, impatient to secure their independence from Britain at the Paris Peace Conference. As the movement gained ground, the British tried to put a stop to the nationalist agitation by making Paris irrelevant to the Egyptian question. Wingate announced that any change in the status of Egypt would be treated by His Majesty’s government as “an imperial and not an international question.” In other words, Zaghlul and his colleagues would have to discuss their ambitions with the British government in Whitehall, as an imperial question, rather than argue Egypt’s case to the world in Paris. The British administration gave Zaghlul a direct warning to stop his agitation. When he disregarded the British warning, Zaghlul and his principal colleagues were arrested on March 8, 1919, and deported to Malta. The result was a nationwide uprising that marked the beginning of Egypt’s Revolution of 1919.

 

The public response to the arrest of Sa’d Zaghlul and his colleagues was immediate and violent. The country rose up in a combination of spontaneous and planned revolts that spread from the urban centers to the countryside and involved all levels of Egyptian society. The demonstrations began on March 9 when a group of students rioted and vandalized the infrastructure they associated with British rule, such as trains, trams, and lamp posts. The anti-British demonstrations and their repression by British forces left many dead and wounded on both sides.

The ancient mosque university of al-Azhar became one of the nerve centers of the uprising. After British forces arrested a number of teachers and students from al-Azhar on March 13, the British chief of security, Joseph McPherson, visited the mosque to observe the political agitation firsthand. Wearing only a fez for a disguise and receiving unfriendly looks from the Egyptians around him, McPherson could not get through the front door of the mosque because the crowd was so large. Yet even from his limited vantage point he could see a religious shaykh inside the mosque
“haranguing an audience of many hundreds from the top of a pile of stones, telling them that they must scorn death itself in their efforts to destroy the tyrant, and throw off his yoke, and promising Paradise to ‘Martyrs’ in the holy cause.” McPherson saw money being collected by the Central Revolutionary Committee to raise the revolt in the countryside.
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Rural communities also struck against those things they associated with British rule—the produce depots and railway facilities through which their requisitioned crops were transported during wartime were sabotaged, along with the telegraph lines that provided administrators with efficient communications. In the cities themselves, the urban working classes resorted to industrial action. The Egyptian state railway went on strike. The Cairo tramways went on strike. McPherson, the British security chief, catalogued the participants in the uprising, from schoolboys to street sweepers, with mounting disdain: “howling lunatics in the streets, women emancipated for the occasion making stump orations, children and rapscallions of all sorts shouting ribald doggerels in contempt of the fallen tyrants.”

The Egyptians remember 1919 differently. It was for many their first opportunity to take part in the political life of their nation. They were united in a common belief that the Egyptians should rule over their own country without foreign interference. It was the first real nationalist movement in Arab history, in which nationalist leaders enjoyed the full support of the masses, from the countryside to the cities.

The women of Egypt made their entry into national politics for the first time in 1919. Their leader was a woman named Huda Sha‘rawi. The daughter of a Circassian mother and an elderly Egyptian notable, Huda Sha’rawi (1879–1947) was born into privilege and confinement. Raised in the harem of an elite Cairo household, she grew up surrounded by women, children, and eunuchs. In her memoirs, she writes of two mothers—her father’s first wife, whom she called “Big Mother,” and her own mother. She loved them both but felt particularly close to Big Mother, who “knew how I felt when people favoured my brother over me because he was a boy.”
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As a child, Sha’rawi resented being given less education than her young brother. A devoted student, she pressed her tutor to bring her grammar books so that she might learn to read the Qur’an properly. “Take your book back,” the children’s eunuch told the tutor. “The young lady has no need of grammar as she will not become a judge!” Huda was despondent. “I became depressed and began to neglect my studies, hating being a girl because it kept me from the education I sought. Later, being a female became a barrier between me and the freedom for which I yearned.”
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While still a teen, Huda learned to her dismay that she was to become the second wife of an elderly cousin named Ali Pasha Sha’rawi. “I was deeply troubled by the idea of marrying my cousin whom I had always regarded as a father or older brother deserving my fear and respect. I grew more upset when I thought of his wife and
three daughters who were all older than me, who used to tease me saying, ‘Good-day, stepmother!’”
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She went to her bridal bed like “a condemned person approaching execution.” Not surprisingly, the marriage was not a happy one and the couple was soon estranged. They spent seven years apart, which gave Huda a chance to mature and develop her own interests before returning to her husband and resuming her role as the wife of an influential man.

The years of her marital estrangement proved a period of political development for Huda Sha‘rawi. She began to organize public activities for women. She invited a French feminist, Marguerite Clement, to give a lecture in the Egyptian University, comparing the lives of eastern and western women and discussing social practices such as veiling. This first lecture gave rise to a regular series in which Egyptian women began to speak, including the Egyptian feminist Malak Hifni Nasif (1886–1918), the first Egyptian woman to make public demands for the liberation of women.
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In April 1914, Sha’rawi convened a meeting to establish the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women, a literary society that brought together some of the pioneers of women’s literature in the Arab world, including the Lebanese writer Mai Ziyada, and Labiba Hashim, the founder of one of the earliest women’s magazines.