Arabs (29 page)

In the 1890s Egyptian reformers were beginning to articulate a different role for women, none more forcefully than the lawyer Qasim Amin (1863–1908), who argued that the foundation of the national struggle for independence had to begin with improving the position of women in society.

Qasim Amin (no relation to Ahmad Amin) was born into privilege. His Turkish father had served as an Ottoman governor and attained the rank of pasha before moving to Egypt. Qasim was sent to the best private schools in Egypt and went on
to study law in Cairo and Montpelier. He returned to Egypt in 1885 and was soon caught up in the reformist circles around Muhammad Abduh.

While his colleagues debated the role of Islam and of the British occupation in Egypt’s national revival, Qasim Amin focused on the status of women. In 1899 he wrote his pioneering work,
The Liberation of Women
. Writing as a Muslim reformer to a Muslim audience, Qasim Amin connected his arguments to a secular nationalist agenda of liberation from imperialism.

Denied access to education, let alone to the workplace, only 1 percent of women could read and write in Egypt in 1900.
³⁸
As Qasim Amin argued then, and as the authors of the Arab Human Development Report still argue today, the failure to empower women disempowers the Arab world as a whole. In Qasim Amin’s words, “Women comprise at least half the total population of the world. Perpetuating their ignorance denies a country the benefits of the abilities of half its population, with obvious negative consequences.”
³⁹
His critique, written in classical Arabic, was biting:

Qasim Amin drew a contrast between the progress of women’s rights in Europe and America and the contribution of women to civilization in the West, and the relative underdevelopment of Egypt and the Muslim world. “The inferior position of Muslim women is the greatest obstacle that prevents us from advancing toward what is beneficial to us,” he argued.
⁴¹
He then connected the position of women to the national struggle. “In order to improve the condition of the nation, it is imperative we improve the condition of women.”
⁴²

The Liberation of Women
provoked intense debate among reformers, conservatives, nationalists, and intellectuals. Conservatives and nationalists condemned Amin’s work as subversive to the fabric of society while religious scholars accused him of subverting God’s order. Qasim Amin responded to his critic with a sequel published the following year under the title
The New Woman
, in which he abandoned religious rhetoric and argued for women’s rights in terms of evolution, natural rights, and progress.

Qasim Amin’s work does not live up to the expectations of modern feminist thought. This was an argument among men, debating the benefits they should confer on women. In his call to improve education and the general position of women in
Egyptian society, Amin fell short of demanding full equality between the sexes. Yet for his time and place, Qasim Amin pushed the agenda of women’s rights farther than had ever been done before. The debates provoked by his work set change in motion. Within twenty years, the initiative would be taken up by elite women in Egypt, who entered the nationalist movement and began to demand their own rights.

 

Under the impact of the great debates of the day—on national identity, Islamic reform, and social issues like gender equality, a distinct Egyptian nationalism began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. Two men proved most influential in shaping early Egyptian nationalism: Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Mustafa Kamil.

Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) was the son of a rural notable who attended a modern secondary school and, in 1889, entered law school. Though he is acknowledged as one of the disciples of Muhammad Abduh, Lutfi al-Sayyid did not privilege Islam as the basis of national regeneration. Rather, Egypt as a nation was the focus of Lutfi al-Sayyid’s political vision. In this sense, he was one of the very first nation-state nationalists in the Arab world. He differed with those who gave their primary allegiance to the Arabs, or the Ottomans, or to pan-Islamic ideals. As a founding member of the People’s Party, established by the circle of Muhammad Abduh, and through his writings in the newspaper he edited,
al-Jarida
, he promoted the ideal of an Egyptian nation with a natural right to self-rule.

Lutfi al-Sayyid objected to the British and the khedives as two forms of autocracy denying the Egyptian people legitimate government. Yet he recognized the benefits of sound administration and financial regularity that came with British rule. He also believed that, under the circumstances, it was unrealistic to hope for independence from Britain. The British had vested interests in Egypt and the military strength to uphold them. Rather, Lutfi al-Sayyid argued, the Egyptian people should use the British to change the Egyptian government by imposing a constitution on the khedive and to build up the institutions of indigenous rule—both the Legislative Council and the Provincial Councils.

Ahmad Amin was a regular at Lutfi al-Sayyid’s office at the
Jarida
newspaper, where Egyptian nationalists would gather to debate the issues of the day. Here Ahmad Amin received his social and political education, “thanks to the lectures of our Professor Lutfi [al-Sayyid] and others, and my contact with a select group of the best intellectuals.”
⁴³

Lutfi al-Sayyid represented the moderate wing of the nationalist movement in Egypt, a man who was willing to work with the imperialists to bring Egypt up to a standard where it could achieve independence. There was, however, a more radical version of Egyptian nationalism, and its champion was Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908). Like Lutfi al-Sayyid, he received a modern education in law, in Cairo and in France.
He was a founding member of the National Party. While in France, Kamil connected with a number of French nationalist thinkers, who were every bit as hostile toward British imperialism as was the young Egyptian. Kamil returned to his homeland in the mid-1890s to agitate for the end of the British occupation. In 1900 he founded a newspaper,
al-Liwa’
(“the banner”), which proved an influential voice piece for the nascent nationalist movement.

Kamil was a brilliant orator and a charismatic young man. He provided the national movement with broad support among students and the street. For a while, he also enjoyed the clandestine support of the khedive Abbas II Hilmi (r. 1892–1914), who hoped to exploit the nationalist movement to put pressure on the British. Yet the young religious scholar Ahmad Amin was not at first won over by Kamil’s radical nationalism, which he dismissed as emotional rather than rational.
⁴⁴

In a sense, the great challenge facing nationalists in Egypt at the start of the twentieth century was that the British had done so little to provoke the Egyptian people to revolt against them. Though the people of Egypt resented the idea of foreign rule, the British brought regular government, stability, and low taxes. Few Egyptians ever came into contact with their British occupiers, who were a remote and self-contained people little given to mixing with the common people of Egypt. Thus, while the Egyptians did not like being under British rule, the British had done nothing to provoke them out of a complacent acceptance of colonial rule.

Until the Dinshaway Incident.

 

In 1906 a British hunting party entered lands of the village of Dinshaway in the Nile Delta on a pigeon shoot. A group of outraged peasants surrounded the British to stop them from killing their pigeons, which they raised for food. In the fracas that followed, one British officer was injured and died seeking help. Lord Cromer was out of the country at the time, and his caretakers grossly over-reacted. British soldiers arrested fifty-two men from the village and convened a special tribunal, as the Egyptian public followed developments avidly through the newspapers.

Ahmad Amin’s politics and reading habits changed dramatically after the Dinshaway Incident. He remembered the date precisely—June 27, 1906—when he and his friends were having dinner on a roof terrace in Alexandria. “When the newspapers came, we read that four of Dinshaway’s people were sentenced to death, two to hard labor for life, one to fifteen years in prison, six to seven years in prison, and five to fifty lashes each. We were [overcome with grief], the banquet turned into a funeral, and most of us wept.”
⁴⁵
Henceforth, Amin claimed, he only read Mustafa Kamil’s radical nationalist newspaper in his local coffee shop.

Amin’s conversion to nationalism was repeated across Egypt. Newspapers conveyed the tragedy to people in the cities, and folk poets spread the news from village
to village with the songs they composed recounting the tragedy of Dinshaway and the injustice of British rule.

Calm eventually returned to Egypt, though Dinshaway was not forgotten nor were the British forgiven. In 1906 the foundations for a nationalist movement were all in place. Yet nationalists in Egypt found themselves confronting a British Empire that was looking to expand its presence in the Arab world rather than retreat. Indeed, Britain’s moment in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East was just beginning.

CHAPTER 6

N
ationalism emerged in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the twentieth century. It was at first difficult for the Arab peoples of the empire to imagine themselves in a separate state after nearly four centuries under Ottoman rule. The early nationalists grappled with conflicting notions of what an Arab state might look like. Some imagined a kingdom centered in the Arabian Peninsula whereas others aspired to statehood in discrete parts of the Arab world, like Greater Syria or Iraq. Nationalists before their time, they were marginal in their own society and faced such repression from the Ottoman authorities as to discourage others from following their lead. Those who wished to pursue their political dreams were forced into exile. Some went to Paris, where their ideas were nourished by European nationalists; others traveled to Cairo, where they were inspired by the Islamic reformers and the secular nationalists agitating against British rule.

Arab disenchantment with Ottoman rule grew more widespread after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The Young Turks were ardent nationalists who instigated the revolution to force the sultan to restore the 1876 Constitution and to reconvene the Parliament. These measures met with widespread support among the Arab subjects of the empire, who believed the Young Turks would liberalize Ottoman rule. They soon learned, however, that the new regime in Istanbul was determined to strengthen its hold over the Arab provinces through a more rigorous application of Ottoman rule.

The Young Turks introduced a series of measures they viewed as centralizing, but which many Arabs saw as repressive. In particular, they promoted the use of Turkish
as the official language of the empire over Arabic in the schools and public administration of the Arab provinces. This policy alienated Arab ideologues, for whom the Arabic language was an integral part of their national identity. The very measures the Young Turks imposed to reinforce the Arabs’ attachment to the empire had the unintended consequence of encouraging a nascent nationalist movement. By the 1910s, groups of intellectuals and army officers had begun to organize secret nationalist societies to pursue Arab independence from Ottoman rule. Some of these nationalists entered into correspondence with the European powers through their local consulates, hoping to secure outside support for their aims.

The difficulties faced by the early Arab nationalists were nearly insurmountable. The Ottoman state was omnipresent, and it cracked down ruthlessly on illegal political activity. Those seeking independence for the Arab lands lacked the means to achieve their goals. Gone were the days when a strong man from the Arab provinces might rise up to defeat Ottoman armies, like Muhammad ’Ali had done. If the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century had achieved anything, it was to make the central government stronger and the Arab provinces more subordinate to Istanbul’s rule. It would take a major cataclysm to shake the Ottoman grip on the Arab world.

The First World War was to prove that cataclysm.

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in alliance with Germany in November 1914. It was a war that the Ottomans would have preferred to avoid. The empire was battle weary after fighting the Italians in 1911 over Libya and the Aegean Islands, and after two devastating wars with the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. As a major European war loomed in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman government hoped to stay out of the fight and secure a defensive alliance with Britain or France. However, neither Britain nor France was willing to enter into binding commitments against their Entente partner, Russia, whose territorial ambitions the Ottoman Empire feared most of all.