 | CHAPTER IX The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS
What is the Egyptian "nation" of whom Saad
Pasha Zaghlul and the Party of Independence have
claimed with so much emphasis to be the only recognised
leaders? That question can best be answered by analysing
the peculiar structure of Egyptian society, which
presents some important features without any parallel
in other Oriental countries.
The population of Egypt has risen from six and a half
to over thirteen millions during the British Occupation,
in spite of epidemics and grossly unsanitary conditions
and an appalling infantile mortality. It is already in
some parts inconveniently dense, and geographical and
economic conditions must in a not very remote future
oppose almost insuperable obstacles to its indefinite
expansion. It is on the whole remarkably homogeneous.
There is not in Egypt the multitudinous congeries of
races and creeds and castes and languages we have
had to deal with in India, nor the tangle of different
nationalities we find in Asia Minor and South-Eastern
Europe. Practically all Egyptians speak the same
Arabic tongue, which was imported by the followers of
the Prophet when they swept over Egypt from Arabia
thirteen centuries ago. The vast majority are Mahomedans,
and the mediæval teachings of El Azhar
affect still to-day a far larger number of the rising generation
amongst the small minority who receive any education
the Europeanised schools and colleges under State control.
The small Coptic minority numbers less than one
million. Like other races elsewhere that have been
excluded from political power, it has developed a great
aptitude for the more elementary forms of finance.
Copts have been employed as revenue collectors under
every successive régime, and well into Mehemet Ali's
time the Coptic year (different from both the Mahomedan
and the Christian year) was used as the Egyptian financial
year. To the present day Copts are employed in considerable
numbers under the Finance Department. They
are scattered all over the country as money-changers
and money-lenders and petty traders. Thanks very
largely to American missions, many of them have now
received a measure of Western education, and not a
few men of wealth and large estates are found amongst
them. Until quite recently they kept very much aloof
from their Mahomedan fellow-countrymen, whom they
regarded with intense jealousy and distrust, and it was
a bitter grievance with them that, after the Occupation,
the British refused to give them, as a Christian community,
preferential treatment over the Mahomedans. But now
quite a number of them have joined the Nationalist
cause with a great show of enthusiasm. There are
Copts even in the Nationalist Delegation, and Coptic
priests have paraded the streets in Nationalist demonstrations
arm in arm with Mahomedan Ulema, and have
even been allowed to enter the mosques and preach
Egyptian fraternity from their pulpits. I cannot say
that all this effusive fraternisation impresses me very
much, as I witnessed similar scenes in Constantinople
after the Turkish revolution, when during the short
honeymoon of Turkish Nationalism Armenian and Greek
priests also went about arm in arm with turbaned
Mollahs, which did not prevent the old story of Christian
massacres repeating itself soon afterwards all over Turkey.
I am more inclined to believe what some Copts have
that many of the noisiest Nationalists amongst them are
prompted chiefly by the conviction that, whatever
happens, they have nothing to fear from the easygoing
British, whereas they might have a good deal to
fear from their fellow-countrymen if they failed to profess
sympathy with a Nationalist movement that ultimately
resulted in the effacement of British influence. They
had indeed a very fair sample of what it would mean for
them in the savage attacks made upon them during the
popular rising in 1919.
The small but not unimportant Syrian and Armenian
communities, which are amongst the most progressive
elements in the country, occupy a singularly anomalous
position which is not only of historical, but also of actual
interest, as it is directly affected by the release of Egypt
from Ottoman suzerainty. They and one or two other
still smaller Christian communities have their own
ecclesiastical organisations which, subject in most cases
to their respective Patriarchates at Constantinople,
Antioch, Mosul, etc., have enjoyed in Egypt the internal
rights of self-government conferred upon them by the
early Ottoman Sultans. But as Turkish rayahs they
have always been denied the privileges and immunities
which foreigners can claim under the Capitulations,
though the French and the Greeks have at times tried to
assert them on behalf of their own protégés, such as the
Maronite Syrians and the Greek Orthodox. Many
of them have been settled for years and even for generations
in Egypt, some of them have risen to high positions,
and most of them have become to all intents and purposes
Egyptians. But Egyptian Nationalism has of late
distinctly encouraged the tendency, of which there have
always been traces, to treat them as foreigners and
interlopers.
Among the Mahomedans the old Turkish and Circassian
families still form a kind of aristocracy that regards the
real Egyptians as an inferior race. Most of the Egyptian
amongst them, and as many of them have large landed
estates, their influence is considerable. They constitute
the chief conservative element in the country, and though
many profess to be strong Nationalists they mostly belong
to the moderate wing. To them the breach with Turkey
means a great deal more than to other Egyptians. Many
of them still had family connections in Turkey, and when
they went to Constantinople they were treated there with
distinction as Turks who merely happened to reside in
Egypt. They looked up to the Ottoman Sultan as their
hereditary sovereign and not merely as a shadowy suzerain.
They had therefore a better excuse than most Egyptians
for resenting the British Protectorate. But a good many
have been profoundly alarmed by the tendency of the
Nationalist propaganda to undermine every principle of
authority, and with the memory of the first Nationalist
movement under Arabi in their minds they do not feel
at all certain that triumphant Nationalism would not
turn upon them again and try to rend them as foreigners.
They may not love us, but they would rather put up
with us than become the servants of Egyptians whom
they used to rule.
The reigning house, descended from the Albanian
Mehemet Ali, is also of Turkish origin, and at the present
moment occupies a more peculiar position than ever.
The Nationalists hesitate at present to define their attitude
towards the head of the Egyptian State, but some unquestionably
incline in principle towards a Republican
form of government. Hardly any disguise their distrust
of the present Sultan Fuad, who spent most of his life
in Italy, and talks Italian better than Arabic. They do
not regard him as either a representative Egyptian or a
representative Mahomedan. Of the other princes now
in Egypt, Omar Tussoon enjoys to-day much the same
respect as did the late Sultan Hussein, and for the same
reasons, and without the disadvantage of having committed
himself to the new order of things. Kemal-el-Din,
who know him well and believe, probably rightly, that he
might have succeeded his father had he been less reluctant
to place himself under British tutelage. The mere fact
that the ex-Khedive Abbas Hilmi used to put as many
spokes as he could into the British wheels has sufficed
to rally a small but not insignificant party t the cause
of a ruler who, as long as he was in Egypt, was universally
feared and almost universally detested. Others, again,
are more favourably disposed towards his son, partly
because he is believed to have separated himself from his
father. One thing only is quite clear. A self-governing
Egypt would be no bed of roses for the present reigning
house.
At the other end of the social scale is the fellah, the
real Egyptian of the soil racy, who forms nine-tenths of
the Egyptian population. None has changed in some
respects so much, in others so little, since I first went to
Egypt, though two generations have grown up within
that time. If we have stumbled in our endeavours to
promote the intellectual, or moral, or political education
of the Egyptian people, the material benefits which
he has derived from British control during the last three
decades are beyond dispute. They jump to the eye.
Long since gone is the spectacle I witnessed in the days of
Ismail, of whole gangs of wretched peasants being dragged
away in chains from their own fields to cultivate the vast
estates which the Khedive and his favoured Pashas had
systematically filched from the people. Gone is the old
system of cor, under which the well-nigh annual task
of averting the alternate menace of a dangerously high
or a dangerously low Nile was carried out by forced labour
cruelly recruited and still more cruelly handled. Gone
is the kurbash, that used to blister the soles of the
fellaheen's feet until they had disgorged their last piece
of hidden silver or wearied the tax-gatherer's arm. I
remember in the early years of the Occupation their, at
first, almost incredulous joy when each landowner, however
a paper setting forth the exact amount of land tax he had
to pay, and discovered that, having paid it, he was quit
of all the time-honoured forms of exaction. No less
genuine was his appreciation of the next great boon
conferred upon him by the readjustment of the land tax,
which put an end to its most glaring inequalities and
completed the transformation of all the conditions of
agricultural life.
Yet what happened during the war when British supervision
was relaxed or proved inadequate shows how
quickly the old evils would revive if the fellah were left
once more to the tender mercies of the petty village
tyrants and local authorities. For he has remained in
many ways and with rare exceptions the same totally
illiterate peasant that he was, working during the critical
seasons of the agricultural year as hard and with as
thorough an understanding of his business as any other
peasant in the world—the Chinaman himself perhaps
not excepted—but otherwise abysmally ignorant and
with no interests outside his village and the price of land
and its produce. He has, on the whole, prospered
exceedingly, but prosperity has only very superficially
affected his outlook on life. The Egyptian village is still
mostly a dingy collection of mud hovels, though with a
larger sprinkling of two-storied houses built of sun-dried
bricks. The brass pots and pans and other household
furniture are more numerous and of better quality.
Holiday clothes are more gaudy, gold and silver bangles
and other ornaments are more abundant, and European
shoes and stockings are a favourite form of extravagance.
More money is spent on marriage festivals and such-like
occasions of popular merrymaking. But he has only just
begun to awaken even to the deplorably insanitary
conditions in which he and his forebears have lived from
times immemorial.
A recent report by Dr. Balfour's Commission on the
future work and organisation of the Public Health
"To-day the greater part of Egypt is filthy and no self-respecting
people can be raised in such filthy surroundings.
As of old, Egypt is plagued with disease, and it is hopeless
to expect a disease-ridden people to play their proper part
in furthering the welfare of their country. The infant mortality
in Egypt is appalling, actually one-third of the children
born dying in infancy. The verminous condition of the
fellaheen shows no improvement, though lice are now known
to be conveyers of typhus and relapsing fevers which account
for so many deaths."
Equally hopeless must it be to expect in such conditions
any great improvement in one of the most disquieting
aspects of village life. Though the fellaheen are on
the whole of an easy-going nature and good-tempered,
and free from the gross immorality rampant in Egyptian
town life, almost every village is either divided into hostile
factions whose feuds frequently lead to crimes of violence,
or else dominated by a handful of bad characters who,
sometimes in collusion with Omdehs of the worst type,
terrorise the countryside. The result is seen in the
alarming statistics of crime, especially murder and
attempted murder, robbery, arson, and destruction of
crops, i.e., just the crimes due to village vendettas. There
is no healthy public opinion that can be enlisted on
the side of the authorities to put them down. On the
contrary, if some ruffian is caught almost red-handed, it
is often impossible to get even the relatives of his victim
to come forward and give evidence against him for fear of
reprisals. They prefer to wait for his acquittal, when
they deal out their own vengeance upon him. British
Advisers and Inspectors have set their face against
the rough-and-ready methods by which the old-fashioned
Mudir and Mamour used to destroy such pests, and the
more fastidious judicial methods we have introduced
have proved dangerously ineffective. Ten years ago,
when things were not even nearly as bad as they are now,
as an administrative measure, of "notoriously
dangerous persons," merely after an inquiry conducted
in each case by special commissions in accordance with a
special form of procedure. As soon as this law was
passed, 281 persons were deported to the Dakhla Oasis,
and in the following year there was a notable reduction
of the sort of crime dealt with under its provisions.
But for reasons which have never been made public the
Law of 1909 has been allowed to fall into desuetude, and
of late years the annual returns of crime have been soaring
upwards with frightful rapidity—a factor which must not
be lost sight of in connection with the sudden outbreak of
violence amongst the fellaheen during the rising in March,
1919. Nor should the large and wealthy landowning
class, mostly absentees, and many of them rack-renters,
lose sight of it. They have made huge fortunes out of the
general rise in the prices of agricultural produce and
especially out of the enormous rise in the price of cotton.
They are improving the opportunity to screw up the
rents of their tenants, and though Egypt is to a great
extent a land of small proprietors—there are about a
million and a half holdings of under ten feddans—most
of these try to rent an additional bit of land from their
wealthier neighbours. Many of them can afford at
present to pay even extortionate rents. But the moment
they cannot afford to do so there is bound to be trouble.
The British Occupation has taught them for the first
time in their history that the fellah too has rights, and
Nationalism has recently taught them that violence is
at least excusable in the assertion of grievances. An
agrarian movement, if once started under the pressure
of economic distress, might easily assume against the
landlords the same disorderly character of violence as the
anti-British rising last year.
Amongst the native urban population there are respectable
and well-to-do traders in the bazaars, and skilled
craftsmen and artisans, and petty Government officials,
still stand in the old ways and are much less affected by
political agitation, except possibly that which proceeds
from El Azhar, than by the enormous rise in the cost of
living. The small wage-earners are those that have been
most badly hit, and they are gradually learning to protect
their interests by forming their own trade unions and
going on strike for a living wage. But labour questions
as we understand them at home are never likely to bulk
very large in Egypt, for, in a country which is not and
can probably never be a great manufacturing country,
there are no solid industrial masses capable of organising
big labour movements. The largest groups are those
that have grown with the growing internal and external
trade of Egypt, such as railwaymen, transport workers,
and Alexandria dock labourers. It is chiefly these that
have resorted during the last twelve months to the novel
weapon of strikes, hitherto scarcely known in Egypt, and
it is doubtful whether they would have done so but for
the contagious influence of political turmoil. Labour
conditions generally are still very primitive and chaotic,
and as there are large numbers of foreigners, particularly
Greeks and Italians, amongst the labouring class, or at
least amongst the skilled workmen, effective labour
legislation is no easy matter so long as the Capitulations
impede the enforcement of the same laws on foreigners
and natives.
Essentially a product of modern Egypt and of increased
contact with Europe, is the still numerically small middle
class confined almost entirely to the towns, but with
here and there a few recruits amongst the more prosperous
and ambitious fellaheen. It is essentially the politically-minded
class—lawyers, and doctors, and journalists, and
Government servants who have received either in Egypt
or abroad a more or less thorough Western education,
and have imbibed a certain amount of Western ideas.
Its outlook is still largely affected by its Mahomedan
environment, from which it can hardly emancipate itself
seclusion in which ancient traditions and superstitions
thrive. There are signs, however, that these barriers are
gradually breaking down, and one of the most striking
features in the political turmoil of the last twelvemonth
has been the conspicuous part played by the women of
Egypt.
In Egypt, as in most Oriental countries whose domestic
institutions have brought about the seclusion of women,
the influence she nevertheless wields behind the sheltered
walls of the hareem is apt to be often underrated. Polygamy
in Egypt is rare, and generally regarded with disfavour,
except perhaps as a luxury for the rich. In her
own home the Egyptian woman, in spite of the proverbial
contempt in which the superior sex holds her, is not
infrequently a very despotic mistress, both as wife and as
mother, and her counsels and commands go abroad with
husband and sons after they have crossed the threshold of
their house into the outside world which is supposed to
ignore her very existence. Until recently the Egyptian
lady of the upper classes knew no society outside her home
except that of her own sex, but the collective influence
exercised through hareem society on the habits and
opinions of male society was, and is, an important factor.
In the old days of the Khedive Ismail, the Princess Mother,
who had a vast establishment of her own, was a power
in the land, and an almost greater power was the chief
eunuch of her palace, a pure negro from the Sudan,
who was her trusted and extremely unscrupulous confidant.
Even in much later days the source of many
political intrigues could be traced to the recesses of some
great personage's hareem. Native wit and feminine
charms went a long way to make up for lack of education.
For a good many years past, however, many Egyptians
of position have begun to give their daughters a semiEuropean
education, sometimes even having European
governesses to reside in their houses, and there are to-day
a certain number of Egyptian ladies who are as well
Nazli, when twenty years ago she alone ventured to open
her house to a small circle of male visitors. Increasing
opportunities of European travel, and even the close contact
maintained by many Egyptians of the better classes
who are of Turkish origin with Constantinople, where the
revolution of 1908 produced a great feminist ferment,
imported new ideas and new aspirations into the Egyptian
hareem. There was not, until recently, any breach on
a large scale with the old traditions, but they no longer
inspired the same unquestioning reverence.
The fellaheen could never seek to impose similar restrictions
on their womenkind, for girls and grown-up women
have to go out and do their share—and a very heavy
share—of work in the fields. The fellah indeed too often
treats them as mere beasts of burden, and whilst the
husband jogs along at his ease on a donkey, the wife
toils behind him carrying a big load on her head. Nevertheless,
in most cases, she rules in her own home, especially
if, as is often the case, she develops considerable business
capacity. It is she who generally markets all such
produce as cheese, milk, eggs, etc., and she even becomes
an expert in the sale of cotton. In an interesting paper
read before the Cairo Geographical Society two years ago,
Sir William Willcocks has described how many wives
of fellaheen have profited by the rising tide of
agricultural prosperity to start a little money-lending
on their own account, and not infrequently to their
husbands. In one well-to-do village where the value of
the land held by the fellaheen amounted to about a quarter
of a million sterling, mostly in quite small holdings, and
they had cleared off the whole of their indebtedness except
£25,000, some 80 per cent. of the women had small sums
of money out on loan, and their husbands were found to
have borrowed from them altogether no less than £6,000,
and often at very high rates of interest. The profits at
least remain in the family instead of going into the pockets
of Greek and Coptic usurers, and the woman's hold upon
consideration in a country where, according to
Mahomedan custom, he can divorce her by a mere word.
The proportion of illiteracy amongst the women of
Egypt is still appalling. Not one per cent. yet know how
to read or write. But the movement in favour of female
education which started in the upper classes has begun
to spread down to the humbler classes, and the old
prejudice against it is dying out even in the rural districts.
Amongst the Western-educated middle class especially
there are many who feel the lack of intellectual fellowship
in their own homes which must continue until their
womenfolk have a larger share in the advantages of
education. It was just at this stage of social and intellectual
transition that political agitation suddenly opened
to the women of Egypt an unexpected opportunity of
emerging en masse from their seclusion. To those in
whom an incipient spirit of revolt against the artificial
life in which they had hitherto been cribbed, cabin'd
and confined was already stirring, the cry for "complete
independence" naturally made a strong appeal, for
even if they knew little of the larger political issues
which it raised, was it not enough that it generated
ideas of freedom which could not possibly stop at the
outer doors of the hareem? Many of them, doubtless,
were keen to ingratiate themselves with their lords and
masters; others snatched greedily at new forms of excitement
that broke the monotony of their lives. They all
worked themselves up into a frenzy of patriotic indignation.
In the stormy days of March and April 1919 they
descended in large bodies into the streets, those of the
more respectable classes still veiled and shrouded in
their loose black cloaks, whilst the courtesans from the
lowest quarters of the city, who had also caught the
contagion, disported themselves unveiled and arrayed
in less discreet garments. In every turbulent demonstration
women were well to the front. They marched in
for "Independence" and "Down with the English!"
and waving national banners. They flocked to the
houses of the Extremist leaders, and the leading Egerias
of Nationalism addressed impassioned orations to them
from their windows. They followed in large crowds
the coffins of the rioters killed in the street affrays, and
their shrill lamentations were an eloquent appeal for
vengeance. They took a hand in the building of barricades,
and though they generally dispersed when fighting
actually began, some of them, it was noted, returned to
gloat over brutal deeds of violence perpetrated by the
men. When the Government officials went on strike
excited groups of women acted as pickets outside the
gates of the Ministries to hold up those who wanted to
return to their duties.
In the fellaheen rising the women, embittered perhaps
by the hardships they had suffered through the ruthless
requisitioning of war supplies and the arbitrary recruitment
for the Labour Corps in their villages, "by order of
the British Government," as they were told, joined with
the men in tearing up the railway lines and destroying the
telegraphs, and in the pillaging and burning which took
place up and down the countryside. Women were
again equally prominent in all the noisy demonstrations
against the Milner Mission, one of their favourite devices
being to take possession of the tramway cars at some
terminus and drive through the city—without, of course,
paying any fares—yelling "Down with Milner!" and
other patriotic amenities, and flaunting little paper flags
in the faces of any Europeans who ventured to claim
their right to travel in public conveyances.
Still more serious is it that the infection spread into
the girls' schools. These, like the boys' schools, went on
strike to mark their disapproval of Lord Milner and his
colleagues, and children of eleven and twelve concocted
passionate telegrams of protest to the Minister of Education,
and even to the Prime Minister. Members of the
not restrain their own daughters. The girls were indeed
more violent than the boys, and some of the few English
women teachers had an extremely unpleasant time at
the hands of their mutinous pupils. Much of this may
seem childish, but it would be wrong to make light
of the widespread bitterness that underlies this feminine
upheaval. For the women of Egypt, though they may
be politically powerless, reflect, perhaps in an exaggerated
but none the less alarming form, the general uprising
against authority produced by the Extremist campaign
against the British "usurpers."
Participation in turbulent street demonstrations may
not have been the healthiest form of emancipation, but
so sudden and violent a change is bound to leave a permanent
mark upon the women of Egypt. Whether the
men of Egypt were wise to encourage it may be left
to them to discover. Anyhow, it has imported a new
and very potent ferment which is likely to affect social
life more deeply than political life.
It is characteristic of the change which the last forty
years have wrought in the mentality of the Egyptians
that they have acquired a conception, however extravagant
at times, both of individual and national rights
which could have little or no meaning for them before
the Occupation, when for centuries there had been no
rights except those of a despotic ruler, whose will could
override every law, and was in fact itself the only law.
It is to our credit as well as to the Egyptian's that the
rule of law which we succeeded in establishing, though
still imperfectly, during the period of British control
has raised him to this higher conception of his rights
and endowed him in consequence with a new sense of
self-respect. Corruption and nepotism are still rife,
and have increased appreciably during the last year of
political unrest as soon as British control slackened.
But Egyptian opinion now professes at any rate to
reprobate them, though it is a fact of no slight significance
obvious reasons British control has always been reluctant
to interfere, viz., the Wakf, has remained a sink of corruption.
Yet it is the one which, in its capacity of trustee
for a vast number of estates placed by bequest under
the protection of Mahomedan "Pious Foundations,"
should of all others distinguish itself by its integrity.
But if the Egyptian has still to learn to assert his rights
as freely in his relations with his own rulers as with us,
he knows that, whether as a landowner, or a lawyer,
or a doctor, the lawful fruits of his labour are far more
secure to him than they ever were before. From us
too he has learnt, for good and evil, the value of political
organisation. Even his wildest political aspirations are
the outcome of this new spirit of self-reliance which we
have ourselves helped to breed in him, and, had we not
sat so long on the safety-valves, it would perhaps have
asserted itself with less explosive violence. Though
he expresses his opinions with unaccustomed freedom,
one rarely heard at first of a case in which his politics
affected his personal relations with, and even his liking for,
individual Englishmen, though in this respect also there
has been latterly a marked change for the worse.
What he has yet to acquire is a sense of social duty.
There are plenty of Egyptians ready to denounce the
seamy side of Western civilisation, but few who care
to apply its better lessons to the grave evils from which
Egyptian society suffers. They admit the terrible
obstacles which some of their domestic institutions and
ancient superstitions oppose to all real progress, but
they too often admit them with a mere shrug of the
shoulders, reserving all their energy for their political
activities. It is rare to find amongst wealthy Egyptians
any sort of practical interest in the welfare of their
less fortunate fellow-countrymen. Of the large landowners,
even amongst those who dwell on their estates
and look after them in person, few do anything to improve
the miserable conditions in which the fellaheen live at
good deeds prescribed by the Koran, which the old-fashioned
orthodox Mahomedan considers himself bound
to perform, the philanthropy which at home maintains
hospitals, endows schools and colleges, promotes housing
for the poor, etc., is almost unknown even amongst the
Egyptian educated classes. We have our own slums
and our wretched little waifs and strays at home that
are still a blot on our social system. But one cannot
walk about the streets of Cairo very long without being
horrified at the crowds of children whom few Egyptians,
until we shamed them into it, made any attempt to care
for. It is pitiful to see them growing up in the most
abject degradation and, with the precociousness of the
East, drifting at an early age into criminal and vicious
practices of which too many of them already bear the
plainest marks. Only in recent times has the Egyptian
ceased to leave it entirely to a few devoted foreigners,
mostly missionaries and Roman Catholic religious orders,
to do something to reclaim them.
The Nationalists may use official supineness as a text
for belabouring the Government and British control
behind it, but they seldom think, either individually or
collectively, of putting their own hand to the plough.
They may reasonably complain that we ought to have
done more and better in such matters as education and
public health, but one would listen to their complaints
with more patience if they could point to anything
they have done, or done better, themselves. Government
schools have done little credit to us, but they are infinitely
superior to the private schools started by Egyptians,
who for the most part run them as sordid speculations.
The Nationalists attribute to official disfavour the failure
of the so-called Egyptian University to fulfil the high
expectations of its well-meaning founders. But the real
reason must be sought in the totally inadequate response
made by the Egyptians themselves when they were asked
to put their hands in their pockets, and if it still survives,
subvention of £2,000 from the very Ministry of Education
to which is imputed a desire to strangle it.
One looks in vain for a single hospital endowed or
maintained by Egyptians. Perhaps the most popular
medical institutions in Egypt are the travelling hospitals
for ophthalmia maintained by Sir Ernest Cassel's
generosity. One wealthy Egyptian was fired to emulate
his example a few years ago by starting a travelling
hospital for another disease almost as widespread as
ophthalmia. The opening ceremony was attended by the
ex-Khedive and Lord Kitchener. But little has been
heard of it since then. The war is said to have served
as an excuse for closing it down. The Ministry of Wakf,
which administers Mahomedan trusts, has, it is true,
a medical service of its own, and provides out of its
budget for the Abbas General Hospital and an Ophthalmological
Hospital in Cairo, as well as for several clinics.
But as the Department of Public Health has no rights
of inspection over these institutions, one can only infer
from the meagre pittances allowed to them that they form
no exception to the general rule of inefficiency and worse
for which the Wakf administration is notorious amongst
Egyptians themselves.
Or take again the Egyptian representative bodies.
Their usefulness need not be denied, but they have not
enhanced their credit by constantly clamouring for larger
powers. For they never learnt to use even the opportunities
they had for pertinent criticism, and too often
preferred to raise intemperate discussions on questions
which were not constitutionally within their purview.
Compare, for instance, the industry and ability with which
the late Mr. Gokhale and other Indians used their equally
limited opportunities to bring trenchant but practical
criticism to bear upon the Government of India in the
Viceroy's Legislative Council. It is the same with the
Egyptian Press. How few native papers conducted by
Egyptians condescend to honest argument or common
to discuss. Yet the Press constitutes almost the only
literature that appeals to the average Egyptian, even
amongst the Western-educated classes. Egypt has produced,
chiefly in the shape of poetry and rhetorical newspaper
articles, a considerable amount of Nationalist
literature, but it has produced hardly any national
literature worthy of the name either in history, or in
science, or in art. The Egyptian Institute and the
Egyptian Geographical Society are modelled on European
lines, and some of their foreign members, and a few
Egyptians trained to European methods of study, have
made creditable contributions to the world's knowledge,
but these have met with more appreciation abroad than
in their own country.
It is, however, unfair to expect too much from people
in whom character was atrophied by centuries of oppression
before the British Occupation. The Nationalist movement
at its best has been touched with genuine idealism,
and even at its worst it has shown how far the Egyptians
have already travelled from the servile attitude of even
such relatively recent times as those of the Khedive
Ismail, when the members of the Chamber of Notables
convoked by him were told that the supporters of
the Government should take their seats on the right,
and those in opposition on the left, and all rushed
with one accord like a flock of sheep to the right lest
they should incur their lord and master's displeasure
by the remotest suggestion of opposition to his sovereign
will.
But whatever the elements of real nationhood that
may be found to-day in Egypt, there is one very grave
flaw in the Egyptians' claim to be not only entitled to
complete national independence but already fully equipped
to stand by themselves as a living nation. No nation
can be independent in fact, even if it be so in name, that
has allowed itself to fall into complete dependence upon
foreigners for almost all that is essential to its economic
strange spectacle of large foreign communities dwelling
in its midst, and to a great extent outside and above its
own laws, who discharge, because the Egyptians have
never learnt to discharge them, many and not the least
important of the functions on which economic life depends.
Even the new Western-educated middle class has utterly
failed hitherto to prove its capacity or indeed to take any
practical interest in the higher forms of commerce, or
industry, or finance. There is no important business,
no great industrial undertaking, no big bank, no shipping
or insurance company conducted by Egyptians. On
the rare occasions on which Egyptians have attempted
anything of the sort, their enterprise has failed lamentably,
or more often remained stillborn. It is not that they
lack the necessary capital, for they invest freely in land
and house property. It is difficult to discover the reasons
for this arrested development. The Nationalists put it
down to the blight of "foreign domination." But what,
then, of Bombay, for instance, where British rule has not
prevented Parsees and Mahomedans and Hindus competing,
often very successfully, with the British in every
form of modern enterprise? Whatever the causes of
that arrested development in Egypt, the result is only too
clear. The economic life of Egypt has been thrown
entirely into the hands of foreigners, and of foreigners
upon whom the Capitulations confer a privileged
position such as no foreign residents enjoy in any European
country. Of Alexandria, which is the economic nervecentre
of Egypt, it may be said with far more truth than
of Egypt as a whole that it is a bit of Europe in Africa.
Each of the great European communities which, through
the default of the Egyptians themselves, constitute to-day
the chief factors in the commercial, industrial, and
financial life of Egypt is itself an imperium in imperio,
with extensive rights of its own and with only very
limited obligations towards the country out of which
it makes its living. Several of these communities are
than our own British community. The latter numbers
only 24,000, whereas there are 56,000 Greeks, 40,000
Italians, and 21,000 French, to name only the most
important, now that the Germans and Austrians have
practically disappeared with the war. All these communities,
including our own, may comprise some very
dubious elements, but taken altogether they display a
high standard of industry, and enterprise, and business
capacity, and it is they who have built up the whole of
the external and a large part of the internal trade of
Egypt, and given an exchange value to her immense
agricultural wealth in the markets of the world. They
have grown steadily since the British Occupation in 1882,
and though some of them may not have much love for us,
and we have at times found them extremely unaccommodating,
they have relied as much as our own people upon
the maintenance of British control as the chief and,
indeed, essential guarantee for their safety. They generally
distrust the Egyptians, as many Englishmen do, and
though they may be more inclined than we are to treat
them with an outward show of easy familiarity, they
betray at times a contempt and dislike for them which
very few Englishmen entertain. If they criticise British
methods of control it is not because they consider them
too forceful, and if they believed there was any real
prospect of our withdrawal from Egypt they, and probably
their Governments, would protest vigorously against it
as a gross betrayal of common European interests.
That the Nationalist leaders are anxious to propitiate
them at any cost has been shown by their remarkable
change of front in regard to the Capitulations. Perhaps
the most genuine of Egyptian grievances against England
has been her failure to secure any real abatement of these
oppressive servitudes. Yet now, when we are definitely
and formally pledged to take up the question of the
Capitulations, and are in a much stronger position to
overcome the opposition of other Powers to any serious
upon Egypt, the Nationalists, rather than be indebted
for this boon to the Protectorate, avowedly prefer to
put up with restraints which are a far more effective
bar to any real independence than the maintenance of
Egypt's connection with the British Empire is likely to
constitute. This is one of the paradoxes that illustrate
the lack amongst Egyptians of any sense of perspective.
They have abandoned to others the control of the great
economic forces essential to the life of a modern nation.
Yet they profess to believe that the mere formula of complete
political independence will, as by the stroke of a
magic wand, ondow them with every organism required to
assure the life of a nation.
| CHAPTER IX The Egyptian problem | |