Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The pressure of population, the productivity of the land from multiple cropping (average annual yields about twice those in Europe), and monopolized landownership drove land prices and rents upward just as they drove wages downward. This gave rise to a steady increase of renting and sharecropping before 1952. By 1948 the cash rental of land per acre was about 30 percent higher than the average net income per acre. Thus the situation in the rural economy was explosive.

These problems reached this critical level under the shield of the artificial prosperity of Egypt during the war. As the chief base for the Allied war effort in the Near East and the center of the British resistance to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Allied supplies and money had poured into Egypt and provided wages and a higher standard of living for all. Moreover, high wartime prices for cotton had created a temporary boom. By 1947 all this collapsed, and hundreds of thousands who had been supported by British spending during the war were wandering the alleys of Cairo without money, work, or hope.

In sharp contrast with the poverty of millions, about 400 families had made immense fortunes from the land since 1850. In 1952, when 250 acres brought its owner an income of about $20,000 a year, the royal family had close to 200,000 acres, and the few hundred landlord families held over a million acres. Little of these incomes was devoted to any constructive purpose, although few of their possessors lived such dissolute and wasteful existences as Farouk.

These economic discontents were capped by political unrest. Egypt had been granted its independence by Great Britain in 1922, but the latter continued to interfere in the governing of the country by peremptory notes or even ultimatums (as in 1924 and 1938). Submission by the monarchy or the government to such pressure roused great animosity in the Assembly, which was generally dominated by the irresponsible nationalist party, the Wafd (led successively by Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa Nahas). Relations with Britain were finally regulated by a treaty in 1936 which established a twenty-year alliance, granted Britain continued possession of the naval base at Alexandria until 1944, and allowed it to keep a force of 10,000 men in the Canal Zone. Other British forces were withdrawn, and the disputed question of conflicting British and Egyptian rights in the Sudan were compromised to allow limited Egyptian migration and limited use of Egyptian troops in that area.

The most significant result of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was a double one. By providing for withdrawal of British troops from Egypt proper, it made it necessary for Egypt to establish its own army; at the same time, it established two political issues (British troops in the Suez Canal Zone and incomplete Egyptian control of the Sudan) on which that new army could agitate. Most significant of all, Mustafa Nahas’s decree of 1936 establishing the Military Academy to train officers for the new army opened this career to any Egyptian, independent of class or economic status. This created the opening by which ambitious and relatively poor young men could work their way upward in power and wealth. It was the first essential step toward the Nasser government of the 1960’s and, for the first time in thousands of years, made it possible for Egypt to be ruled by Egyptians (the Muhammad Ali dynasty of 1811-1952 was of Albanian origin). The first class of the Military Academy to graduate after the Treaty of 1936 was the class of 1938, whose members, led by Nasser, made the revolution of 1952. Most of the leaders of that revolt were either the sons or grandsons of poor peasants. The chief aims of their revolt were agrarian reform, elimination of waste, inefficiency, and corruption from the Egyptian government, and the completion of independence by the withdrawal of British influence from the Canal Zone and, if possible, the Sudan.

The revolt moved forward under the impetus of increasing shame and hatred for the Farouk monarchy. In this process two chief steps were the British ultimatum of 1942 and the defeat by Israel in 1948, since these opened an unbridgeable gap between the dynasty and the officers’ group. The conspiracies of the class of 1938 began almost immediately upon their graduation from the Military Academy, when Gamal Abdel Nasser joined a group which exchanged secret oaths to reform Egypt by expelling the British. By 1939 most of this group were in contact with the “Muslim Brotherhood,” a secret band of fanatics founded in 1929 to establish (by assassination and violence, if necessary) a political regime founded on purely Muslim principles. Many of both groups were involved in the anti-British and pro-Nazi agitations throughout the Near East of 1938-1942. These centered around the fanatical Mufti of Jerusalem and culminated in the pro-Nazi revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani in Iraq, during Hitler’s conquest of Crete in April 1941. Britain used force to overthrow the new pro-Hitler government in Iraq, but the anti-British agitations continued throughout the Arab world. When they became acute in Egypt in February 1942, the British ambassador, accompanied by British tanks, visited King Farouk in the Abdin Palace and gave him a choice between cooperation with Britain or deposition. The king yielded at once, but many of the younger officers were outraged at this affront to Egyptian dignity, and Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Naguib resigned his commission in protest at an army which was “unable to protect its king.”

Ten years later, when Farouk’s disgraceful behavior had alienated most of the army and disquieted much of the world, this same Naguib, by then a heroic general who had been wounded three times in the war of 1948 with Israel, was the nominal head of the revolt.

This revolt was engineered by a small group of five officers whose real leader was Nasser, although the latter, who had been conspiring against one thing or another since his schooldays, was virtually unknown to the police until the revolt had already started.

Like most revolts, that of 1952 started from an event which had little to do with the conspirators’ plans. In October 1951, Mustafa Nahas, who had signed the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, enacted a law to abrogate it. Shortly afterward, guerrilla attacks on the British military installations in the Canal Zone drove the British forces to seek to disarm the Egyptian police nearby. In the resulting fight about fifty Egyptians were killed and a hundred wounded. The next day (January 26, 1952) riots in Cairo burned down about four hundred buildings, including the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, the center of British tourist life in Egypt. Damage ran to over $60 million, but the real destruction was to the Egyptian political system.

Police and army both refused to fire upon the incendiaries of January 26th. Farouk, who had no wish to alienate the British, dismissed Prime Minister Nahas for the Cabinet’s inadequate efforts to suppress the disturbances. But no successor could be found capable of winning the confidence of the diverse groups who sought to exploit the miseries of Egypt.

On the night of July 22nd, eight young officers seized control of the army headquarters, the radio stations, and the government, and forced Farouk to make General Naguib head of the army. Only two soldiers were killed in the process. Four days later, with tanks surrounding the palace, Farouk was forced to abdicate and was sent into exile.

The new revolution had neither doctrine nor program, and continued to improvise year after year. A civilian prime minister was replaced by General Naguib on September 7th, and he was replaced by Nasser on February 25, 1954. Most decrees, with the exception of the Agrarian Law of 1952 and its subsequent revisions, were concerned with the officers’ junta’s efforts to consolidate itself in power. Opposition groups from all parts of the political spectrum were arrested, usually imprisoned without trial, and sometimes tortured. Some were tried and executed. All political parties were dissolved and their assets confiscated “for the people.” A rather vague pro-junta party, called the National Liberation Rally, was established to support the new regime, but without any real program. The Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and striking labor unions were persecuted, and most of the wealthy elite were cut down in wealth and influence.