5 – Egypt
“Yahia el Watan! Yahia el Watan!” (Long live the nation!).
Demonstrators, Egypt 1919.
The modern day nation of Turkey was not the only one to emerge from the rump of the Ottoman Empire. Egypt would also make her first appearance as a modern nation state as a result of the end of the First World War, and in a way that will seem very familiar to those who keep up with 21st century current affairs in the region.
While there had been a basic separation between the Ottoman government in Constantinople and the centre of power in Cairo since 1805, the Sultan remained the official leader of Egypt and the local figurehead, the Khedive, a subsidiary. When war broke out between the Ottomans and the British in 1914, who retained a strong influence in Egypt, the British stepped in and elevated the Khedive to an equivalent to the Sultan, declaring the country as their protectorate.
This excited many Egyptian nationalists, who saw the break with Constantinople as a forerunner for full independence when hostilities ended. The nationalists – similarly to their counterparts in Ireland and Turkey – were a minority and largely drawn from an educated, middle class elite in the cities, however the hardship of war on the majority of the population soured the reputation of the British and saw the average Egyptian increasingly turn towards nationalism as a political ideal.
Local labourers had been conscripted to work for the British, thousands of foreign soldiers had arrived in Egypt as a staging post and huge swathes of resources, particularly food, were requisitioned to suit the needs of the British war effort. Unsurprisingly, the occupying forces were far from popular. When the war was won and the British army failed to leave, the anger in the streets was palpable.
A coterie of nationalist leaders, organised in the Wafd Party and lead by Saad Zaghlul, demanded that they be including in the peace talks to end the war as representatives of the Egyptian people. They organised in the streets, coordinating huge campaigns of civil disobedience against the British regime and agitating among the wider population.
As the British were wont to do in such situations, they rounded up Zaghlul and other leaders and threw them in jail. They were exiled to Malta and back home, huge protests sprung up. Civil disobedience escalated to mass strikes, demonstrations and sabotage of British institutions with almost a thousand Egyptians killed in the process. By the end of 1919, the protectorate was in full blown revolt.
The revolution encompassed both Christians and Muslims, poor and rich, urban and rural, men and women. The British centre, occupied by colonial wars in Ireland and the Middle East as well as intervening in the Russian Civil War, could no longer hold. A report in 1921 recommended that Egypt be granted independence and on February 22 1922, the new nation was born. In 1924, Saad Zaghloul was elected Prime Minister.
The manner in which the nation of Egypt came into existence has marked it ever since. Few nations can compete in terms of popular involvement in politics and particularly in the participation of the streets in the political discourse. Governments would be deposed by the people in 1952 – when Gamal Abdul Nasser deposed the King on the back of a popular revolt and created the Egyptian Republic – and again most famously in 2011, when the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak was smashed from below. The repercussions of the First World War live on, in spirit at least, in Egypt.