Arabs (59 page)

The demonstrations reflected the Egyptian people’s impatience for change. In the aftermath of the Palestine disaster Egyptians were disenchanted with political parties, disillusioned by King Farouq, and increasingly intolerant of the British position in their country. The postwar era was an age of decolonization, and the British had long outstayed their welcome in Egypt.

Egypt went to the polls in 1950 to elect a new government after the turmoil of defeat in Palestine and the assassination of Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi in December 1948. The Wafd secured victory and formed a government that resumed negotiations with the British to achieve the full independence that had eluded Egyptian nationalists since 1919. Between March 1950 and October 1951, the Wafd conducted talks with the British government. After nineteen months of talks failed to produce results, the Wafd government unilaterally abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. The British refused to recognize the abrogation, which would have turned their forces in the Suez Canal Zone into an illegal army of occupation. And though the British Empire was on the retreat—the British had withdrawn from India in 1947—the strategic importance of the Suez Canal remained a cornerstone of British foreign policy.

Having failed to achieve its goals through negotiation, the Wafd stepped up pressure on the British by other means. With the tacit approval of the Wafd government, young men—mostly Muslim Brothers, students, peasants, and workers—volunteered for guerrilla units, known as
fida’iyin
(literally, “fighters ready to sacrifice themselves”). In October 1951 the guerrilla bands began to attack British troops and facilities in the Canal Zone. The British responded to these attacks with force. One of Nawal El Saadawi’s classmates left his medical studies to join the fida’iyin and was killed in action against the British, a martyr for the cause.

The armed struggle in the Canal Zone provoked intense political debates in Cairo. Saadawi remembered a student rally she attended at the university in November 1951. She listened with growing impatience to the student politicians—Wafdists, Communists, Muslim Brothers—as they struck heroic poses and waxed rhetorically. Then one of the fida’iyin, a man named Ahmed Helmi, was called to the podium. He was one of the freedom fighters who had taken part in the attacks
on British troops occupying the Canal Zone. He appealed to his squabbling classmates in a quiet voice. “Colleagues,” he explained, “the freedom fighters in the Canal Zone need ammunition and rations, their rear lines have to be stable to protect them, there is no time, no room for partisan struggles. We need unity of the people.”
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Saadawi was riveted by the intense young man and later married him.

By January 1952 the British had decided to use military force to assert their control over the Suez Canal Zone. British forces began to occupy Egyptian police stations in the Canal Zone in order to prevent the policemen from lending their support to the fida’iyin. On January 24 the British secured the surrender of 160 policemen in their station in one of the canal towns without a fight. The Egyptian government was embarrassed by the ease with which the British had taken over the station, and in response it called on Egyptian policemen in the Canal Zone to resist the British “to the last bullet.” The opportunity came the very next day, when 1,500 British troops surrounded the governorate in Ismailiyya and demanded its surrender. The 250 policemen guarding the government offices refused. The British pummeled Egyptian positions with tank and artillery fire for nine hours, as the Egyptians fought until their ammunition was depleted. By the time they finally surrendered, the Egyptians had suffered forty-six dead and seventy-two wounded.

News of the British assault provoked outrage across Egypt. A general strike was declared for the next day, Saturday, January 26, 1952. Workers and students converged on Cairo in the tens of thousands. The city braced itself for a day of mass demonstrations protesting the British action. Yet nothing had prepared the people or government of Egypt for Black Saturday.

Dark forces were at work in Cairo on Black Saturday. What began as a series of angry demonstrations quickly degenerated into violence in which over fifty Egyptians and seventeen foreigners (including nine Britons) were killed by the crowd. Provocateurs and arsonists worked under the cover of the demonstrations to generate maximum disorder. Anouar Abdel Malek, a Communist intellectual who witnessed the events of Black Saturday, described how the demonstrators stood aside to watch in fascination as the arsonists put the richest quarters of central Cairo to the torch. “They watched as they did because the splendid capital belonged not to them but to the rich whose businesses were burning. So they let it go.”
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In the course of the day, crowds torched a British club, a Jewish school, an office of the Muslim Brothers, four hotels (including the famous Shepheard’s Hotel), four night clubs, seven department stores, seventeen cafés and restaurants, eighteen cinemas, and seventy other commercial establishments, including banks, automobile display rooms, and airline ticket offices.
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The terrible events of January 25–26, 1952, spelled the end of the political order in Egypt. It was clear to all that the arson attacks, unprecedented in Egypt’s history, had been planned. Rumors and conspiracy theories swept the capital. The Communists blamed the Socialists and the Muslim Brothers. Some argued it was a plot to
undermine the position of King Farouq (who hosted a banquet celebrating the birth of his son on the night Cairo burned). Others maintained the fire was planned by the king and the British to bring down the Wafd and to appoint a caretaker government that would be more responsive to the king’s wishes.

Whatever his role in Black Saturday, King Farouq did dismiss the Wafd government of Mustafa Nahhas on January 27 and appointed a series of cabinets headed by independent politicians loyal to the throne. Parliament was dissolved on March 24, and elections for a new assembly were postponed indefinitely. It looked as though Farouq was following in his father’s footsteps and repeating the 1930 experiment of palace rule. Public confidence in the government of Egypt plummeted.

Ultimately, it matters little who ordered the burning of Cairo (there never has been a conclusive answer to the question). The rumors and conspiracy theories revealed a crisis of confidence in both the monarchy and the government that presaged the coming revolution in Egypt.

 

Though many were talking about revolution in Egypt in 1952, only a small group of army officers was actively plotting the overthrow of the government at the time. They called themselves the Free Officers, and their leader was a young colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Free Officers were united by their patriotism and the firm belief that Egypt’s monarchy and parliamentary government had failed the country. Nasser and his colleagues had been appalled by their experiences in the Palestine War, when they were sent to battle without adequate weapons and found themselves besieged by the Israelis for months and ultimately defeated. The Free Officers came together initially to oppose British imperialism in Egypt. In time, they came to see the political system of Egypt as the main obstacle to realizing their aspirations for total independence from Britain.

In the aftermath of the Palestine War, Nasser recruited some of his most trusted colleagues to join a secret political cell of military men. He drew Palestine War veterans like Abd al-Hakim Amer and Salah Salem; men with connections to the Muslim Brothers, like Anwar Sadat; and Communists, like Khaled Mohi El Din, in an effort to secure the broadest support for their actions. They held their first meeting in Nasser’s living room in the autumn of 1949. As the Free Officers organization grew, new cells were created independent of each other to evade detection. Members of each cell recruited like-minded officers from across the different branches of the Egyptian armed forces.
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They issued their first leaflet in fall 1950 to generate support in the officer corps for their anti-imperialist cause.
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The events of Black Saturday transformed the Free Officers movement. Until January 1952 their focus had been on combating imperialism, and they had restricted their criticism of the government to issues of corruption and collaboration with the British. After January 1952 the Free Officers began to discuss openly the
overthrow of King Farouq and the royalist governments he appointed. They set a target date for their coup in November 1952 and began to escalate their recruitment and mobilization of opposition officers.

The confrontation between the palace and the Free Officers came to a head over the seemingly innocuous elections to the Egyptian Officers’ Club executive in December 1951. For Farouq, the Officers’ Club served as a barometer of the military’s loyalty to the monarchy. The Free Officers decided to use the elections as a means to confront the king and his supporters. Nasser and his colleagues convinced the popular general Muhammad Naguib to run for president of the club at the head of an opposition slate for the board of directors. When Naguib and the opposition slate swept the elections, King Farouq tried by all means to have the results overturned. Finally, in July 1952, Farouq intervened personally to dismiss Naguib and to dissolve the board of the Officers’ Club. The Free Officers recognized that they would lose all credibility if they did not respond to the king’s challenge immediately. As Abd al-Hakim Amer, one of Nasser’s closest colleagues, warned the other Free Officers, “The King has dealt us a strong blow, and unless we reply in the same manner, our organization will lose its credibility with the officers and no one will agree to join us.”
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The Free Officers were in total agreement that failure to act quickly and decisively would land them all in jail. Nasser met with the senior statesman of the Free Officers, General Naguib, to plan an immediate coup against the monarchy. “We unanimously agreed that Egypt was now fully ripe for a revolution,” Naguib recalled in his memoirs. The king and his cabinet were in their summer residences in Alexandria, leaving Cairo to the military men. “It was so hot and sultry that no one besides ourselves would be thinking in terms of an immediate revolution,” Naguib reasoned. “It was therefore the ideal time for us to strike.” They resolved to act before the king had time to appoint a new cabinet “and before his spies had time to discover who we were and what we had in mind.”
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The Free Officers had reached the point of no return. The risks of plotting against the regime were high. The Free Officers knew they would face charges of treason if they failed. They went over their plans very carefully: the simultaneous occupation of the radio station and the military headquarters. The mobilization of loyal military units behind the coup plotters. Measures to ensure public security and to prevent foreign intervention. There were many details to get right in advance of the coup date of July 23, 1952.

The coup plotters were under close government scrutiny, adding to the intense pressures of the last days before the coup. General Naguib was warned by one of his officers on the eve of the coup that he was about to be arrested on suspicion of leading a conspiracy against the government. “I did my best to conceal my alarm,”
Naguib confessed in his memoirs. He decided to stay at home that night, while the coup unfolded, claiming he was under surveillance and feared he might compromise the Free Officers’ plans.
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Anwar Sadat took his wife to the cinema that night, where he got into a very noisy fight with another moviegoer and went to the police station to file a complaint—as good an alibi as a coup plotter could hope for in case of failure.
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Even Gamal Abdel Nasser and Abd al-Hakim Amer surprised their supporters when they showed up for the coup dressed in civilian clothes (they later changed into uniform).
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In spite of their doubts and fears, the Free Officers succeeded in orchestrating a near-bloodless coup. Rebel military units surrounded Egyptian army headquarters and overcame light resistance to occupy the facility by 2:00 A.M. on the morning of July 23. Once the headquarters had been secured, the military units supporting the coup were given the go-ahead to occupy strategic points in Cairo while the city slumbered. When the army had taken its positions, Anwar Sadat went to the national radio station and announced the coup in the name of General Muhammad Naguib, as commander in chief of the armed forces, completing what had been a classic coup d’état.

Nawal El Saadawi was working in the Kasr al-Aini Hospital in central Cairo on July 23, and she described the exultation that followed on from the announcement. “In the wards the patients had been listening to the radio. Suddenly the music broke off for an important announcement which said that the army had taken over control of the country and that Farouk was no longer king.” She was astonished by the patients’ spontaneous reaction. “Suddenly as we stood there the patients rushed out of the wards shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ I could see their mouths wide open, their arms waving in the air, their tattered shirts fluttering around their bodies. It was as though the corpses from the dissecting hall had suddenly risen from the dead and were shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’” Indeed, even the dead were stopped in their tracks, as she saw a funeral cortege leaving the hospital brought to a halt by the news. “The men carrying the coffin put it down on the pavement and mixed with the crowd shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ and the women who a moment ago had been mourning the defunct started to shrill out [in celebration] instead of shrieks.”
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King Farouq and his government crumpled on July 23. Yet the Free Officers had little idea of how to proceed now that their movement had succeeded. “It was obvious that we hadn’t prepared ourselves, when we carried out our revolution, for taking over government posts,” Sadat reflected in his memoirs. “We had no ambition to be government ministers. We had not envisaged that and had not even drawn up a specific government program.”
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They decided to ask veteran politician Ali Maher to form a new government. The Free Officers had no idea what to do with Farouq
himself: Arrest him? Execute him? Nasser made the wise decision to secure Farouq’s abdication and allow him to go into exile rather than risk tying up the new government with potentially divisive judicial proceedings or turning an unpopular monarch into a martyr through a messy execution. Farouq abdicated in favor of his infant son Ahmed Fuad II, under a regent, and was seen off by General Naguib on July 26 with a twenty-one-gun salute from Alexandria in the royal yacht Mahroussa.