 | The Egyptian problem |  |
INTRODUCTORY
This volume has grown out of a series of articles
contributed to The Times from Egypt between October,
1919, and April, 1920. I am indebted to the proprietors
of The Times for permission to reproduce them,
but I have amplified and to a large extent rewritten
them, as there are many aspects of the Egyptian question
to which only the briefest reference could be made
within the limits of space allowed to me, however liberally,
in a daily newspaper at a time when the world is full of
equally urgent questions. As an almost essential preamble
to any serious attempt to describe the Egyptian Nationalist
movement with which we are confronted to-day,
I have reviewed in a few preliminary chapters the story
of modern Egypt since that ancient land emerged again
little more than a century ago from mediæval obscurity
and almost complete oblivion into the limelight of world
history.
The present upheaval in Egypt is not merely incidental
to the storm of unrest that the Great War has let loose
upon other countries besides Egypt, nor is it due solely
to the British Occupation or the British Protectorate.
It has far deeper causes. The Egyptian question is
bound up with a large part of the world's history for the
last hundred years. It dates back to the great Napoleonic
struggles of which British sea-power determined the final
issue; it played, under Mehemet Ali, a big part in
accelerating the decay of the Ottoman Empire; it grew
of steam power enabled her to reopen the old maritime
trade routes between Europe and the Orient through the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and ultimately led to the
making of the Suez Canal. British intervention thereupon
became inevitable as soon as the misrule and
financial profligacy of Mehemet Ali's successors plunged
Eygpt into ruin and anarchy, and it was the greatness
as well as the imperfections of the work which England
found herself impelled to undertake during an occupation
prolonged far beyond her original expectations that
produced in the shape of Egyptian Nationalism the
stirrings of that spirit of revolt against European ascendancy
which the impact of Western civilisation provokes
sooner or later amongst all Oriental peoples. As elsewhere
it has set in motion forces, in part progressive
and in part reactionary, which in Egypt, under the
particular impulse given to them by the war, have found
expression in a skilfully organised political campaign
against the maintenance of the British Protectorate as
well as in an explosive outburst of emotional patriotism,
never entirely free, in an Oriental and Mahomedan people,
from racial and religious passion.
At a time when self-government is recognised more
clearly than ever before to be the keystone of the British
Empire and has been set before the peoples of the greatest
of our Oriental dependencies as the goal which they
also shall reach, it is not unreasonable that Egypt should
claim something of the same boon as the corollary of
the permanent association with the British Empire into
which we sought to force her during the war by the
proclamation of a British Protectorate. Were that her
whole claim, few if any responsible Englishmen would
refuse to go a long way to satisfy it without questioning
too closely the actual fitness of the Egyptians to govern
themselves. But the Egyptian Nationalists, who have
at least temporarily carried the bulk of their articulate
fellow-countrymen with them, go much further than that.
themselves before the British occupation, and indeed
better than they have been governed under British
control, which, except possibly from the point of view
of material prosperity, has, they affirm, arrested their
national evolution. Nor is that all. They assert that
Egypt won for herself under the great Mehemet Ali
from the Sultan of Turkey the recognition of an autonomy
tantamount to independence, and that the war, in which
she contributed handsomely to the victory of the Allied
Powers, having finally severed the last of the very shadowy
ties that bound her to her Ottoman Suzerain, her former
status of autonomy has become automatically and
de jure one of complete national independence, of which,
in accordance moreover with the principle of self-determination,
she demands the immediate recognition by all
and sundry, and above all by Great Britain.
Whilst I have, I think, shown in the following pages
that the British Occupation certainly did not rob Egypt
of a freedom and independence which she had never
enjoyed, I have sought to describe in no hostile spirit the
genesis of Egyptian Nationalism, and to discern the
elements of Egyptian nationhood on which it has been
built up. I have not shrunk from acknowledging our own
share of responsibility for the dangerous deadlock into
which we have drifted, and if I have recalled the solid
benefits which the people of Egypt have derived from
British control, however anomalous the conditions under
which it was exercised, I have not attempted to minimise
its partial failures and the gradual deterioration of its
methods, or to deny the reality of many grievances which
it is our duty to redress. We can hardly quarrel with the
Egyptians for resenting the way in which the British
Protectorate has been thrust upon them, or the clumsy
and often heavy hand with which we ruled them during
the war. They have a good case for a much larger and
more effective share in the conduct of their public affairs,
and for a progressive measure of self-government. But
they spoil it by pursuing the shadow rather than the
substance and persisting in demands which bear so little
relation to present possibilities that in order to justify
them they are driven to appeal to a mythical past
bearing equally little relation to the facts of Egyptian
history.
It is easy to talk about our withdrawing altogether
from Egypt and leaving the Egyptians to govern or
misgovern themselves. It is equally easy to talk about
our remaining in Egypt and relying solely upon force
to impose our will upon the Egyptians. The practical
difficulties would in either event prove on closer examination
to be almost insuperable. Moreover, to take the
former course would mean the craven repudiation of all
the responsibilities which we have assumed ever since
the Occupation, though we obtained no international
sanction for our assumption of them, at the very moment
when we have for the first time secured that sanction by
enshrining the Protectorate in the Treaty of Versailles.
To take the second course would involve a persistent
violation of our own principles of freedom which a British
democracy would soon decline to tolerate. Either course
represents merely a counsel of despair to which British
statesmanship is not yet so bankrupt as to allow itself
to be driven. The Egyptian problem is in its essence
very similar to the problem with which we have already
been confronted in India, namely, that of setting the
feet of an Oriental people in the path of self-government
whilst continuing to safeguard both internal and external
peace. We declined for a long time to face it in India.
We have at last faced it and made a bold and generous
attempt to solve it. We have never yet honestly faced
it in Egypt. Within the first year of the Occupation
it was—somewhat prematurely—adumbrated in Lord
Dufferin's famous Report. We have continued much
too long to evade it until evasion has begun to spell
disaster. The chaotic conditions which prevail at present
and driven to rely mainly on Martial Law for carrying
on administration and legislation, are rapidly becoming
intolerable to Egyptians and Englishmen alike, as well
as to the large foreign communities which, now that
the Powers have recognised our status in Egypt, have
a better claim than ever to look to us for the maintenance
of orderly government.
I ventured, before I left Egypt, to publish as the
result of my own observations a few rudimentary suggestions
for a solution that should give reasonable satisfaction
to Egyptian political aspirations and restore confidence
in our good will and good faith without endangering the
foundations of national prosperity and individual freedom
which, for the first time in her history, at least since the
Pharaonic age, Egypt owes to British intervention and
British control. My readers, however, will probably be
already in possession of the recommendations of the
Milner Commission, which naturally has had at its disposal
far more abundant materials than can be available to any
non-official inquirer. But whatever its recommendations
—and I do not profess to be acquainted with them—it
will, I feel confident, bear me out in testifying to the
urgency as well as to the possibility of finding an issue from
a deadlock as damaging to our own reputation as to the
well-being of Egypt.
The Oriental mind is hard to read, and even
Sir Alfred Lyall, who read it with more understanding
than most men, used to say that the older he
grew the less inclined he was to dogmatise about it.
It is never harder to read than when it has begun, as to-day
in Egypt, to seek expression in terms of the West. It was
in Egypt that, forty-four years ago, I first felt the fascination
of the East. I saw the last years of the Khedive
Ismail's evil reign. I was afterwards an eye-witness of
Arabi's revolt and of the British Occupation. I have
often returned to Egypt since then, and I have known most
of the chief actors on the Egyptian stage, and enjoyed
which I must leave the reader to appraise for himself.
I have seldom introduced personal reminiscences, as they
are generally irrelevant to an impersonal study of a
difficult political problem. But it is scarcely a disadvantage
to have been able to study the Egyptian problem in
the light of knowledge acquired, on the spot and at the
time, of the many different phases through which it has
passed within the now fairly long span of my own
lifetime.
| The Egyptian problem | |