Arabs (34 page)

These activities marked the beginning of a distinct women’s movement in Egypt, to which Sha’rawi would dedicate the rest of her life. Lectures and women’s meetings broadened the scope of elite women’s participation in cultural affairs in Cairo and provided forums for women to meet and discuss issues of their own choosing without having first to seek their husbands’ permission. Such limited gains were significant in their own right, but the social conventions dictating gender roles had hardly been affected. To challenge such deeply entrenched customs as had long divided men and women in Arab and Ottoman society would take a revolution.

The uprising of 1919 proved as much a social as a political revolution. The spring of 1919 was a time when strict social divides were challenged and briefly overturned. The nationalist struggle provided the opportunity for women to emerge as political actors in Egypt, and left an enduring feminist movement as a legacy. At a more personal level, these events helped Ali Pasha Sha’rawi to reconcile with his wife Huda, and to turn their marriage into a political partnership united by the nationalist cause.

Ali Pasha Sha‘rawi had been involved in the nationalist movement since Sa’d Zaghlul’s fateful 1918 meeting with the British high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, which he attended. With Zaghlul, he was a founding member of the nationalist party that came to be known as the Wafd, or “delegation,” seeking to represent Egypt’s aspirations before the Paris Peace Conference. When Zaghlul was exiled, Sha’rawi took over party leadership. Ali Pasha’s relationship with his wife Huda changed dramatically in the course of the revolution. He kept Huda fully
briefed on all political developments so that, in the event of his arrest, she could help fill the political vacuum. Furthermore, they soon learned that there were things women could do with impunity because the British did not dare to arrest them or fire upon them for fear of provoking public outrage.

The Wafd were quick to seize upon the advantages of mobilizing women for the nationalist cause. The first women’s demonstration took place on March 16, just one week after the outbreak of the revolution. Black placards with slogans in Arabic and French painted in white letters—the colors of mourning—were prepared. The demonstrators then gathered in central Cairo, planning to march to the United States legation as if to claim the right of self-determination Woodrow Wilson promised in his Fourteen Points. Before they could reach their destination, the women demonstrators found their way blocked by British troops. “They blocked the streets with machine guns,” Huda Sha’rawi wrote, “forcing us to stop along with the students who had formed columns on both sides of us. I was determined the demonstration should resume. When I advanced, a British soldier stepped toward me pointing his gun, but I made my way past him. As one of the women tried to pull me back, I shouted in a loud voice, ‘Let me die so Egypt shall have an Edith Cavell’ [an English nurse shot and killed by the Germans during the First World War, who became an instant martyr].” After a three-hour stand-off, the demonstration broke up without violence. Further demonstrations were to follow.

The symbolic power of Egyptian women facing down the British encouraged nationalists across the country. Once outside of their harems, Egyptian women threw themselves into public life with great energy and commitment. They raised funds for the needy, visited the wounded in the hospital, and attended rallies and protests, often exposing themselves to great danger. Women also began to cross the class barrier, as elite women made common cause with working-class women. Huda noted the deaths of six working-class women in the course of the nationalist movement as a “focus of intense national mourning.” Women did all they could to encourage the civil servants’ strike, standing outside government offices and urging workers to defy the British and stay away from work. When Britain sent a commission of enquiry under Lord Milner at the end of 1919, Egyptian women organized another round of demonstrations and drafted a resolution in protest. They began to hold mass meetings attended by hundreds of women of all classes.

At the end of 1919, Huda Sha‘rawi and her colleagues consolidated their feminist gains by organizing the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee, the first women’s political body in the Arab world. Huda Sha’rawi was elected its president. Sha’rawi went on to cofound the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, and she shattered the conventions of women’s confinement that same year when she and her colleagues removed their veils publicly at the Cairo Railway Station on their return from a feminist
conference in Rome. Egypt’s feminist movement long outlived the revolutionary moment of 1919.

 

The Wafd’s struggle for Egypt’s independence met only partial success. Though Zaghlul and his colleagues secured Britain’s permission to present Egypt’s case to the Peace Conference, they learned on their arrival in Paris that the American delegation had just issued a statement recognizing Britain’s protectorate over Egypt. The hopes to which President Wilson’s soaring rhetoric had given rise were now dashed. The Egyptians were forced to negotiate directly with the British in London, rather than securing their independence as part of the postwar settlement.

The years between 1919 and 1922 were punctuated with periods of civil disorder alternating with periods of negotiations between the British and the Wafd. In the end, the best the Egyptian nationalists could achieve was independence in name alone. In the interest of preserving order in Egypt, Britain unilaterally declared the end of the protectorate on February 28, 1922, and recognized Egypt as an independent sovereign state, subject to Britain retaining control over four key areas “of vital interest to the British Empire”: the security of imperial communications, defense of Egypt against outside aggression, the protection of foreign interests and minority rights, and the Sudan. Both sides recognized the limits of independence when put in these terms, which would allow Britain to keep bases, control the Suez Canal, and interfere in Egyptian domestic matters with nearly as much frequency as it had under the protectorate. For the next thirty-two years, Egypt and Britain would be locked in regular negotiations to redefine this colonial relationship, with Egyptians seeking their sovereignty and Britain doing its all to preserve the imperial order.

E
vents in Egypt were closely followed across the Arab world, nowhere more so than in Iraq. The three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul had come under British occupation in the course of the First World War. Though the British had given the people of Iraq many reassurances that they would enjoy self-government, their efforts to deny the Egyptians independence were grounds for concern.

Upon the outbreak of World War I, British forces from India occupied the southern city of Basra and secured their control over the province as a whole. The British were intent on protecting the Persian Gulf gateway to their empire in India from encroachment by the Ottomans’ German allies. Once in Basra, the British extended their forces northward to engage the Ottoman Sixth Army. By November 1915, British forces had advanced to within 50 miles of Baghdad, whereupon they encountered superior Ottoman numbers. The British were driven back to Kut, where they
withstood an Ottoman siege for four months before surrendering to the Turks in April 1916. The Ottomans had now scored two major victories against invading British forces—in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. However, the British resumed their campaign in Mesopotamia, taking Baghdad in March 1917 and defeating the Ottoman Sixth Army in Kirkuk in late summer 1918. British troops occupied the province of Mosul in November 1918, even though technically it fell outside the territory conceded to British occupation by the terms of the armistice agreement. British control over Mesopotamia, as first recommended by the de Bunsen Report of 1915, had been secured.

 

It proved easier to conquer Mesopotamia than to impose a political order on the country—in 1918 as in 2003. The people of the three provinces—Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites—were divided in their aims and aspirations. Though the different communities of Mesopotamia were fairly unanimous in demanding the union of the three provinces into a single, independent state they called Iraq and placing it under a constitutional monarchy, they had very different views on what role Britain should play in that new state. Some large landowners and wealthy merchants put a higher premium on stability and economic growth than on full independence and openly supported British administration. Some Iraqi military officers, who had served with Amir Faysal in the Arab Revolt, saw Britain as a guarantor of Sunni political preeminence. However, the majority of Iraqis rejected the idea of foreign interference in their affairs.

At the start of their occupation over Mesopotamia, the British had reassured the people of Iraq of their honorable intentions. The Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, promising Allied support for “the establishment of national governments and administrations” in the Arab lands through a process of self-determination, was widely reproduced in the local press and reassured many Iraqis that the Europeans did not seek to impose a colonial settlement on them. As the Najaf-based newspaper
al-Istiqlal
(“Independence”) noted: “The two states, Britain and France, delighted us with their statement of intention to assist us towards complete independence and freedom.”
²⁸

But Iraqis grew increasingly suspicious as months passed without any tangible progress toward Iraqi self-rule. Instead of helping the Iraqis set up their own government, the British seemed to be establishing their own administration over the country. When in February 1919 a group of Iraqis sought permission from the British authorities to send a delegation to Paris to secure recognition for their claims to national independence, the British authorities refused. When the Iraqis pressed the British to elaborate their plans for the political future of their country, they could not obtain a straight answer to their question.

The British were, in fact, of two minds themselves on how best to rule Iraq. Some, like Sir Arnold Wilson, who as civil commissioner headed the British administration in Iraq, sought to establish the instruments of direct colonial rule on the model of British India. He even encouraged a steady stream of immigrants from India into Mesopotamia as a ready work force for a colonial administration. Others, like Gertrude Bell, who served as Oriental Secretary in Baghdad, thought it in Britain’s best interests to work with the Arab nationalists in Iraq. Bell argued that a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq would provide an ideal structure for informal empire, at far less cost to the British government and far less risk of confrontation with the growing Arab nationalist movement. The Iraqis did not know whom to believe—Bell, who seemed to support their wishes, or her boss, Sir Arnold Wilson, who seemed intent on the British ruling Iraq.
²⁹

By 1920 the Iraqis were convinced that the British intended to subject their country to colonial rule. They had witnessed the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 from afar. They had watched with growing concern as Britain abandoned Faysal’s government in Damascus and evacuated their troops from Syria and Lebanon, paving the way for a French colonial occupation there. It seemed as though Britain and France intended to deny independence to the Arab lands and to divide those territories among themselves—as of course they did.

Iraqi suspicions were confirmed in April 1920, when the League of Nations assigned Iraq to Britain as a formal mandate. The Iraqis, who had always opposed the idea of a mandate as imperialism by another name, began to mobilize to confront British plans. The opposition was led by a new organization, the Guardians of Iraqi Independence, which had emerged in 1919 primarily among the Shiite community. The Guardians attracted many Sunni supporters with their demands for complete independence and a complete British evacuation from Iraq. They held their meetings in mosques to avoid British interference, alternating between Shiite and Sunni places of worship. This political collaboration between the Muslim communities of Iraq was unprecedented, and it laid the foundations for an Iraqi national community that transcended religious boundaries.

The first public demonstrations against the British mandate in Iraq were peaceful. Shiite clerics, tribal leaders, and members of nationalist organizations demonstrated en masse in Baghdad in May 1920. The British responded immediately with a crackdown on all peaceful demonstrations and arrested those suspected of inciting opposition to the occupation. Under British repression, the Iraqi nationalists were driven from Baghdad to continue their resistance in provincial towns and villages.

The Iraqi Uprising of 1920 broke out at the end of June, encouraged by the Shiite clerics of the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. The British made the mistake of arresting the son of the most prominent Shiite cleric, Ayatollah al-Shirazi, and he
responded with a fatwa, or legal opinion, that encouraged revolt against foreign occupation. Fearing an escalation of the crisis, the British administration in Baghdad arrested a number of Shiite activists and tribal leaders they believed to be instigating the ferment. Predictably, the crackdown hardened what had begun as peaceful opposition into violent confrontation.