 | THE EGYPTIAN PROBLEM The Egyptian problem |  |
THE EGYPTIAN PROBLEM
CHAPTER I
MEHEMET ALI: THE CREATOR OF MODERN EGYPT
It is little more than a century since Egypt emerged
into modern history from the inglorious obscurity into
which she had sunk after Selim the Conqueror incorporated
her in 1517 into the dominions of the then mighty
Ottoman Empire, and Europe, having discovered new
trade routes to the Orient, ceased to take the slightest
interest in her fate. Nor did she then emerge from that
long obscurity by any effort of her own. She was violently
dragged out of it by the vast ambitions of two great
soldiers of fortune, neither of them of Asiatic or of African
but both of European stock, and both born, by a curious
coincidence, in the same year, 1769, in different parts of
the Mediterranean—the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte
and the Albanian Mehemet Ali. Napoleon was prompt to
realise that in the great duel which had commenced
between France and Britain the most vulnerable part of
the British Empire was to be sought in the East, and that
Egypt provided the best strategic base for threatening the
great dependency we were building up in India, and
perhaps driving us out of it as we had not so long before
ourselves driven out the French. Mehemet Ali, who landed
in Egypt during the great upheaval produced by the French
invasion and in the very bay of Aboukir in which Nelson's
to ultimate failure, realised in turn that, in the
steady disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt
offered a rich and fertile field of incalculable potentialities
to his masterful genius.
No European force had landed in Egypt since the
Crusaders, when St. Louis of France was defeated and
captured at Mansourah in the thirteenth century. But
the Egyptian people were not then and never had been
an independent nation since the Persians conquered
them five hundred years before the Christian era. Greeks
and Romans and Byzantines had been their successive
masters until the Arabs swept over Egypt in the first
tide of Mahomedan conquest. Egypt became subject in
turn to the Khalifs of Damascus and of Baghdad, and
for a period to the Fatimite rulers of Tunis. In the
twelfth century she passed into the hands of the great
Saladin, whose dynasty did not long survive him, and
from the middle of the thirteenth century down to the
beginning of the nineteenth century she submitted to the
domination of an alien caste of rulers whose power was
only superficially affected by their more or less nominal
allegiance to Constantinople after the Turkish conquest.
The rule of the Mamelukes in Egypt represents one of the
strangest systems of military despotism which the world
has ever seen. As their name indicates they were slaves.
It was not so much by heredity as by the constant purchase
of male children, chiefly Circassians, who were brought
up from the moment they arrived in Egypt to become
members of the ruling military caste, that Mameluke
domination endured for nearly six centuries. The
Mamelukes seldom if ever intermarried with the people
of the country, whom they regarded and treated as
serfs, and though they certainly did not profess celibacy
as the great military orders of Christendom did, to
whom they have been sometimes compared, their
institutions discouraged the family instinct. Seldom
did the supreme power pass from father to son beyond
he was recognised as such by common consent, or simply
made good his claim at the point of his sharp sword.
During the earlier period of Mameluke rule, before the
diversion of European trade with the East to the new
ocean routes round the Cape, these slave-kings were
able to levy a heavy toll on the transit trade which
still passed through Egypt between Venice and the Orient,
and though often cruel and bloodthirsty tyrants, they
were possessed by the same love of art, especially in the
matter of architecture, as the great Italian "despots"
and condottieri who were their contemporaries. The
noblest monuments of Cairo date back to that period
and still testify to their opulent and fastidious tastes.
The hand of the Ottoman Sultans, though it never
uprooted the Mamelukes, exerted upon Egypt the same
blighting influence as on every other region over which
the shadow of Turkish domination has passed. "Saracenic
art in Cairo took wings and departed." The old
inspiration and the old sources of wealth dried up. The
Turkish Pashas, who represented the Sultan's authority
in Cairo, flitted rapidly across the stage, being changed on
an average every two or three years, but they preyed all
the more ravenously upon the country, whilst the one
principle of policy common to all was to set the Mamelukes
themselves by the ears. But as the Ottoman
Empire waned, the Mamelukes gradually recovered most
of the ground they had lost, and in 1771 one of the rare
men of mark amongst them, Ali Bey, who, had he lived
long enough, might himself have been a Mehemet Ali,
sent the Turkish Pasha packing and for a brief moment
wrested Syria from the Sultan.
What centuries of Turkish domination had not accomplished
Napoleon's meteoric appearance in Egypt did in a
few months. It shattered the power of the Mamelukes.
The flower of them, some 20,000, perished in battle, mostly
at the foot of the Pyramids. Mehemet Ali had merely
to deal with the broken remnants after the last of the
British troops who had in their turn landed to co-operate
with a Turkish force against the French invaders. The
British were the first foreigners to befriend the young
Albanian, who was serving with the Turks as the captain
of a band of his own Albanian followers. He owed his
life on one occasion to Sir Sidney Smith, who hauled him,
drowning, out of the water into his own gig, and on
another occasion his gallantry won special recognition
from a British general in a sharp action against the
French, in which both British and Turkish forces were
engaged. But a few years later the kaleidoscopic
changes in European alliances so frequent during the
Napoleonic wars had led to a breach between England
and Turkey, who had then joined hands with Napoleon
against Russia. Mehemet Ali had by that time risen
to great power in Egypt. The ulema of El Azhar, then
as now a stronghold of Mahomedan influence, had
themselves proclaimed him to be Pasha of Egypt in the
teeth of the Sultan, who merely confirmed him after the
event. When another British expedition was sent to Egypt
in 1807, this time in opposition to Turkey, he inflicted
upon our veteran troops one of the most humiliating
defeats we have ever suffered in the East. Some 450
heads of British soldiers were exposed in the Ezbekieh to
the derisive gaze of the Cairo populace, and we had to
sue for terms to re-embark the remainder of the ill-fated
expedition. To the present day the prestige that attaches
to Mehemet Ali's name amongst the Egyptian people
is due in no small part to those memories.
It was this signal victory over the Infidel that made
him master of Egypt. For the Mamelukes had lost
what little credit they still possessed by throwing in their
lot with ours, and a few years later Mehemet Ali felt
himself strong enough to snare some 500 of their chief
Beys into the Cairo citadel, where they were ruthlessly
slaughtered, whilst thousands of their followers were
done to death in the streets of the capital. Egypt was
which had held the country for so many centuries in its
iron grip was no more. The Mamelukes had ruled by the
sword, and they perished by the sword. Mehemet Ali
spared only the surviving slave-boys who were still
under eighteen years of age, and drilled them much as
they would have been drilled by their Mameluke masters
to be his own devoted henchmen and to form the élite
of the new armies which were to make his name famous
far beyond the borders of Egypt. Yet the Egyptians
had only changed masters. Mehemet Ali never regarded
them as anything but a people of serfs, taillable et corvéable
à merci, though he exploited them with far more intelligence
and to larger ends.
His first care was to consolidate the authority which
he owed to the Sultan's favour by rendering himself
indispensable to him. He undertook to crush the
Wahabi rebellion. Wahabism is still a great force in
Arabia, partly religious and partly political. As a religious
movement it had received its first impulse in the early
part of the eighteenth century from a puritan reformer,
Abdul-Wahab, of the strict Hanbali school of Islam, who
denounced the doctrinal laxity of the Turks and their
corrupting influence on the life of the Holy Places of
Arabia, of which the Ottoman Sultans had constituted
themselves the defenders ever since a descendant of the
Fatimite Khalifs in Cairo had been induced to transfer
to Selim the Conqueror his shadowy title to the Khalifate
of Islam. As a political movement it had derived its
strength from the support of the Beni Saoud, a powerful
Bedouin family of South-eastern Arabia, who placed
themselves at the head of a tribal confederacy to drive
Turkish influence out of the Arabian peninsula. The
Wahabis for a time carried everything before them.
They occupied Mecca and Medina, driving out all the
Turkish authorities and their clients. In their icono-clastic
fervour they laid hands on the sacred shrine of the
Kaaba and the Prophet's tomb and despoiled them of
forbade prayers for the Sultan as Khalif, they prohibited
the use of tobacco and scents and all fine raiment, and
compelled the most rigid observance of every rite and
ceremony prescribed by ancient tradition. The Sultan
appealed to his Egyptian pasha who had driven the British
into the sea in 1807 to crush the Wahabi rebellion, which
had for nearly half a century defied his thunderbolts.
In 1811 Mehemet Ali first sent one of his own sons,
Tussoon, who after one disastrous campaign succeeded
in reconquering Medina, where it is related that a Scotch
renegade who had been made prisoner in 1807 was the
first in the breach and the first to enter the sacred tomb.
Jedda and Mecca surrendered, and Mehemet Ali was
able to send the keys of the Holy Places to Sultan Mahmud
as proof of loyal and victorious service. But not till
1818 was the stubborn resistance of the Wahabis broken
by Ibrahim, another and more famous son of Mehemet Ali,
who captured their last stronghold, Deraya, and rased
it to the ground, and sent Abdullah Ibn Saoud to Constantinople
to pay the penalty for three generations of rebels.
Even then Wahabism did not die out. Its embers
went on smouldering throughout the nineteenth century
and have threatened more than once recently to burst
out again into flame. Another Ibn Saoud marched
forth only last year to challenge the claims of the new
King of the Hedjaz to the hegemony of Arabia. Fortunately
for the latter, whose troops were badly beaten to
the east of Mecca, the Wahabi leader had always entertained
friendly relations with the British power in the
Persian Gulf, and refrained at our instance from pursuing
his victory—at least for the present.
A few years later the Sultan called once more upon
his powerful Egyptian vassal for service in a yet more
dangerous field. The Greeks were waging their long
and heroic struggle for independence and, in spite of many
vicissitudes, with a measure of success which commanded
the sympathies of Europe and strained the resources of
1821 an Egyptian force had saved Crete for the time being
for the Sultan, and as his reward, Mehemet Ali was
appointed titular Pasha of the island. In 1824 he was
appointed Pasha of the Morea, but in this case the title
had still to be made good by force of arms. Mehemet
Ali selected his favourite son Ibrahim, the conqueror of
the Wahabis, to proceed to Greece in command of a
large military and naval expedition which showed to the
astonished Western world what a formidable weapon the
genius of a great ruler had already fashioned in the course
of a few years out of the almost unsuspected wealth of
Egypt. Under Ibrahim's skilful but ruthless leadership
the tide of victory turned steadily once more in Turkey's
favour. The greek leaders quarrelled amongst themselves.
Missolonghi and Athens fell. Thousands of
Greek women and children were shipped off as slaves to
Egypt. But the cruelties which Ibrahim perpetrated
at last exhausted the patience of Europe, and as a consequence
of the London Convention of 1826 Great Britain,
France, and Russia, in spite of Austrian opposition,
dispatched their combined fleets to cruise off the coast of
Greece. After some period of hesitation and abortive
negotiation, the Turco-Egyptian fleet was sunk in the
bay of Navarino on October 20th, 1827, and just a year
later, under Admiral Codrington's threat to bombard
Alexandria, Mehemet Ali at last issued orders for the
prompt evacuation of the Morea. Ibrahim brought back
to Egypt less than half the forces with which he had embarked
on his great adventure, but Mehemet Ali thought
he had taken the measure both of Turkey and of Europe.
His opportunity came when the Sultan made a further
call upon him. Canning was dead and Turkey had as
usual reckoned upon the jealousies of the European
Powers to escape the consequences of Navarino and delay
recognition of Greek independence. Russia, taking the
law into her own hands, sent her armies across the Danube
and was threatening the Ottoman dominions in Asia.
to send his fleet to the Golden Horn and to furnish
a contingent of 20,000 men for the campaign in Asia.
He did not openly refuse to obey the Imperial commands,
but he had reason to distrust the Sultan's good faith and
perhaps also his chances in a war against Russia. During
the Morean expedition, when the Sultan was growing
jealous of Ibrahim's fame as a victorious leader of Islam,
there had been a plot to get the Egyptian army into
Turkish transports and bring it to Constantinople to
await the Sultan's pleasure, which might have taken the
same form as it had with the ill-fated Janissaries. He
temporised until the Turkish defeats and the Peace of
Adrianople in 1829 had given the full measure of Turkey's
weakness.
The sacrifices he had made in Arabia and in Morea for
his Ottoman master had earned for him as yet no adequate
reward. Like the Pharaohs of old, he cast his eyes
across the desert of Sinai to the more fertile land of
Syria. He asked for the Pashalik of Acre in lieu of
that of the Morea, which had become an empty title.
Acre was, moreover, a real thorn in his flesh. For it had
become a sanctuary for thousands of his own subjects
who had sought refuge there from military recruitment
and other exactions. He demanded in the first place
that these should be handed over to him. But he had
to reckon with the bitter personal enmity of Khusrev,
the Ottoman Vizier, who now stood high in the Sultan's
favour—"a shrewd, bold, illiterate barbarian," as Sir
Henry Bulwer describes him, who "was ready to have
every man in the Empire drowned, poisoned or decapitated
if it was necessary to carry out the views of himself
or his master." He had once in Cairo owed his life to
Mehemet Ali, and the humiliation of it never ceased to
rankle. He caused a sarcastic refusal to be sent to
Mehemet Ali, reminding him that the natives of Egypt
were not his chattels and were free to settle wherever
they chose under the Sultan's "beneficent" rule. Such a
resentment. He did not at once venture upon open
rebellion against the Sultan. His feud was, he alleged,
only with Khusrev, who was betraying the interest of
their common lord and master. But he nevertheless
crossed the Rubicon when an army under his son Ibrahim
marched at the end of 1831 into Palestine, and joining
up with the Egyptian fleet at Jaffa proceeded to take
Acre by storm. Nor did an Imperial Firman of May 2nd,
1832, declaring Mehemet Ali an outlaw and deposing
him from the Pashalik of Egypt, have any terrors for him.
Ibrahim routed all the forces hurriedly moved up against
him from Asia Minor. He took Homs, Hama, and Aleppo
in his stride, and by the end of the year he had utterly
defeated a great Turkish army in the heart of Asia Minor
and occupied Konia, the ancient capital of the Ottoman
Sultans, where the sword of Empire is still preserved with
which each in turn receives his investiture on succeeding
to the throne of Othman. Ibrahim was barely more than
a week's march from Constantinople, and no Turkish
force could have arrested his triumphant progress.
The moment, however, had come when he and Mehemet
Ali were to pay for the political blunder of their Morean
adventure and the savagery that had further aggravated
it. By throwing in his lot with the East against the
West and assisting Turkey to crush the Greek rebellion,
Mehemet Ali had alienated the good will of Europe
which he had begun to gain by his friendly and liberal
attitude towards foreigners in Egypt. The European
Powers, alarmed at the prospect of an immediate dissolution
of the Ottoman Empire which Ibrahim's astounding
victories were rapidly opening up, hastened to intervene
at Cairo and at Constantinople. Russia offered the
Sultan substantial military support against the Egyptian
upstart whom the whole Turkish population had acclaimed
as a mightier Defender of the Faith than their own degenerate
Sultan. France, who hoped for great things for
her own interests in Egypt from Mehemet Ali's leanings
dreading to see the Sultan indebted to Russia alone for the
preservation of his Empire, urged him to make his peace
direct with Mehemet Ali, who himself was too much of
a statesman to grasp at more than he could reasonably
hope to hold. British advice carried the day. A convention
signed at Kutahia stayed the Egyptian advance.
The Imperial Firman of outlawry against Mehemet Ali
was solemnly revoked, and another one, issued on May 6th,
1833, granted him anew the Pashalik of Egypt and
added that of the whole of Syria, including even the
doubtful province of Adana.
As it was, Mehemet Ali had overreached himself.
Even victorious campaigns are costly, and in order to
recoup himself he had to grind the last piastre not only
out of his own people in Egypt, but out of his new subjects
in Syria. His son Ibrahim, though less successful
as an administrator than as a general, pleaded for moderation,
but in vain. Risings began to take place, first
amongst the unruly mountaineers of the Syrian Lebanon
and Ante-Lebanon, and then in other parts of the country.
They had never bent patiently under the yoke as the
Egyptian fellaheen had been accustomed to do for centuries,
and if the Turks had chastised them with rods,
their Egyptian masters scourged them with scorpions.
Even Ibrahim's well-meant attempts to restrain the
Mahomedans and Christians of Syria from flying at each
other's throats in accordance with time-honoured traditions
told against him. The Sultan saw his chance of
reversing the Convention of Kutahia, and in 1839 he
declared war once more upon his formidable vassal.
But with no better luck than before. Ibrahim displayed
once more his splendid qualities in the field. He smote
a large Turkish army hip and thigh at Nezib, though
the Turkish Commander-in-Chief had on his staff, but
despised the advice of, a young Prussian officer, von
Moltke, who was afterwards to be Chief of the Staff to
the victorious Prussian armies in the great wars of 1866
the chief instrument and to some extent the inspirer
of William II's fateful determination to use Turkey as
"Germany's bridgehead to world dominion." But
Nezib was a Pyrrhic victory for Ibrahim. Palmerston
had come to regard Mehemet Ali as a danger to the peace
of Europe in general and to British interests in particular.
He ascribed his bold front, not altogether without reason,
to French encouragement. For Mehemet Ali was putting
forward the claim with which Egypt has been once more
ringing—the claim to "complete independence." This
was too much for Palmerston. "The more I reflect,"
he wrote to Bulwer, the British Ambassador in Paris,
"the more I am convinced that there can be no permanent
settlement without making Mehemet Ali withdraw into
his original shell of Egypt." He was prepared to compel
his withdrawal, even if it meant a breach with France,
though he was at one moment willing to accept a compromise
which would have left Mehemet Ali in possession
of Palestine. But the Pasha preferred to build upon the
promise of French support, until it finally failed him
with the retirement of Thiers and the appointment in his
stead of Guizot, who flinched from the prospect of France's
isolation. For England, Austria, and Russia were now
at one with Turkey to drive the Egyptians out of the whole
of Syria. Ibrahim conducted another gallant but losing
campaign. The capture of Acre from the Turks had been
the initial feat of arms of his victorious advance into
Syria and Asia Minor in 1832. In 1839 he lost it back to
a Turkish force supported by British and Austrian ships,
and a few days later began the disastrous evacuation
which ended Mehemet Ali's dream of empire outside
Egypt.
Nevertheless, he snatched one brand from the burning.
At the price of an abject letter of submission, all the
more bitter for him to write as it had to be addressed
to his old implacable enemy, Khusrev,, he obtained from
the Sultan with the consent of the Powers, in return for
the Pashalik of Egypt hereditary in his family and
autonomous. Egyptian Nationalists make great play
with the autonomy which Mehemet Ali wrung out of
the Sultan. But they forget that it was subject to many
not unimportant reservations which effectively clipped
the old lion's claws. The strength of the military and
naval forces he was henceforth allowed to maintain was
very drastically reduced. He remained a vassal of the
Ottoman Empire, and in its official hierarchy the rank
assigned to him was actually inferior to that of the
Sheikh-ul-Islam and of the Grand Vizier—as Abdul Hamid
was fond of reminding the ex-Khedive Abbas when his
visits to Constantinople happened to be inopportune.
Mehemet Ali was then over seventy, and he never
recovered from the blow that had shattered the ambitions
of a lifetime. He had travelled a long way towards his
goal, but he had failed to reach it, and he measured his
failure, not by what he had accomplished, but by what
he had set himself to accomplish. The last years of his
life were fraught with trouble. There were floods and
plagues. The country was depopulated and povertystricken.
As his hand grew weaker the machinery of
government lacked the driving power which he alone had
supplied. His armies had been disbanded and his arsenals
and factories had to be scrapped. He quarrelled for a
time with his favourite son Ibrahim, who after all never
lived to succeed him, though he lived just long enough to
take over the reins for a short time when his father's
faculties began to give way. The end came in 1849, but
for a whole year before he actually passed away the great
Pasha had sunk into senile helplessness.
No authoritative life of Mehemet Ali has yet been
written. Mr. D. A. Cameron's "Egypt in the Nineteenth
Century" gives a graphic, if not altogether dispassionate,
sketch of his romantic career and striking
personality. But he admits the difficulty of doing justice
to the man's character. No Oriental ruler has had warmer
who had personal knowledge of him, but they
observed him in the light of the fierce international
rivalries of which he was himself in a great measure
both the occasion and the victim. That Mehemet Ali
had many of the elements of greatness is beyond dispute,
whilst most of his shortcomings may fairly be imputed
to the age in which he lived and the surroundings in
which he had to carve out his own fortunes. That he is
entitled to take a foremost rank amongst those who
have made history will be least of all denied by anyone
concerned to study the present situation in Egypt. For,
though in many respects he would scarcely recognise the
work of his own hands in the Egypt of to-day, he was
the maker of modern Egypt, for better and for worse.
It is to him that the Egyptians owe the first recognition
of any right of private ownership in land. According
to the late Yakub Artin Pasha, a distinguished Armenian,
whose "Propriété foncière en Egypte" is still the standard
work on the subject, the bargain which Joseph struck
with the Egyptians as recorded in the Book of Genesis,
when "the land became Pharaoh's," had held good for
more than thirty centuries. They had continued to till
the land in common and to be held responsible in
common by villages or groups of villages to the Pharaoh
of the day for his fifth, or more often for whatever share
of the produce his needs or his rapacity chose to exact. The
system had endured under the Ptolemies and the Romans
and the Byzantines. When the Arabs poured into
Egypt in the seventh century, there was so little resistance
that it was doubtful whether under Mahomedan law the
country could be dealt with as a land conquered by the
sword of Islam or should not properly be given the benefit
of having made peaceful submission—a vital question
determining as a rule the rights to be granted to the
population in respect of the tenure of land under Mahomedan
rule. That the former opinion prevailed seems
to be shown by the fact that in the mosques of Egypt
prayer carrying a sword, even if it be only a wooden
sword, as the symbol of conquest. But in practice very
little effect was given to that opinion. The Khalif
Omar treated the Egyptians altogether with great
leniency and respected their ancient land system. Nor
was it radically changed under the Mamelukes either
before or after the Turkish conquest. But at all times,
especially when the country passed under some new
domination or in periods of internal strife and anarchy,
great inroads were made upon the system, and the successive
masters for the time being of Egypt carved out for
themselves individually, and for their families and
followers, huge estates which were treated as their personal
property, and were held under many varying conditions.
They always remained, however, tenancies at will, since
the same arbitrary power that had granted them could
at any time and constantly did resume them. But
there was one feature more or less common to them all.
Keeping for themselves the whole revenue yielded by
the labour of the fellaheen, who became their own serfs,
these holders ceased to contribute anything to the general
expenditure of the State, and the latter had to be met by
increased levies on the rest of the fellaheen community.
In the latter part of the Mameluke period this could only
be done by farming out large districts to revenue collectors,
who bled the fellaheen white, and gradually asserted
proprietary rights of their own. Thus there had arisen
little by little a confused tangle of predatory rights in
the land which left none whatever to the wretched
peasantry who actually tilled the soil.
Mehemet Ali cut through the tangle in his own masterful
fashion. He confiscated all the Mamelukes' estates,
and then asserted with regard to the rest the Pharaonic
right of pre-eminent ownership which had never in
principle lapsed. Thereupon he ordered a rough cadastral
survey of the whole cultivated area of Egypt, and introduced
the system of internal administration of which
at the head of each province, a Mamour in each Merkez
or district, and Omdehs as official headmen of each village.
The land, hitherto held in common by the fellaheen
who were in common responsible for the taxation levied
by the State, was distributed amongst them individually
so that according to the quality of the soil each adult
fellah received from three to five acres, which became
practically his freehold property and were entered in his
name in the cadastral registers. To Mehemet Ali's
keen personal interest in the scheme his own seal affixed
to the land registers in most of the Mudiriehs bears witness.
It was a great and far-reaching reform, and that he
borrowed the main lines from France says no little for
the insight he had acquired into European conditions,
for the French Revolution had then only recently evolved
out of the chaos of the old régime a land system which
created a great and prosperous peasant proprietary.
Unfortunately, Mehemet Ali's practice fell desperately
below the excellence of his theory. To meet the expenses
of the great wars on which he was constantly engaged
he had to impose taxation which, even if levied by
more regular methods, was almost as crushing as the
unregulated spoliation under the Mamelukes, and gradually
his Mudirs and Mamours and Omdehs had to have
recourse to the same methods as the revenue-farmers in
the Mameluke days to screw the last piastre out of the
helpless fellaheen, whilst recruitment for the armies which
demanded incessant reinforcements became an even worse
terror than the kurbash of the tax collector and the
interminable corvées.
At the same time, if Mehemet Ali's exactions were at
times quite merciless, he did not spend the proceeds on
sloth and luxury. He had the European's activity of
mind and body. He liked sometimes to call himself a
Macedonian, and it was in the true spirit of Alexander the
Great that, quite early in his reign, he dispatched two of
his sons to conquer the Sudan, bidding them if possible
Atlantic, or across the Sahara to the Mediterranean.
They failed to get beyond the Blue and the White Nile,
but they reduced the Sudanese to subjection and founded
Khartum, and deplorable as were the later consequences
of Egyptian misrule, it must be counted to Mehemet
Ali's credit that he was the first to open up a large part
of the Dark Continent. He no doubt squandered immense
sums in organising large armies on a new model, and on
the purchase or building of fleets which Egypt had never
before possessed. But he also spent a great deal on
public works which have endured. He created the
port of Alexandria by digging the Mahmudiyeh Canal
to connect with the Nile. He realised the possibilities
for a large expansion of the cultivable area of Egypt by
means of extended irrigation works, and the great Barrage
on the Nile just below Cairo was built in his day, though it
remained a magnificent failure till British engineers completed
it and strengthened it after the Occupation.
The huge trading monopolies which he created and the
arsenals and factories which he erected and equipped
at great cost were economically unsound. But they
gave the first great impetus to the commerce and industry
which, directed afterwards into wiser channels, have
contributed in a large measure to the present prosperity
of Egypt. A Mahomedan by birth, he lived his private
life decently and soberly according to the laws and
customs of Islam, but rarely and only under severe
political stress was he tempted to appeal to Mahomedan
fanaticism. He was fully alive to the value of European
civilisation and of European education. From our point
of view he was entirely uneducated, and he only learnt
to read and write in middle age, but he saw the importance
of educating Egyptian youths for the public services of
the country. The first schools he started with the help of
the French Dr. Clot Bey were medical schools to train
doctors for the army. Other schools followed, and he
bribed his people to send their sons to them not only
them to be taught. The more promising pupils were sent,
also at his expense, to complete their education in France,
or more rarely in England. He encouraged Europeans
to come to Egypt for purposes of trade as well as of travel.
It was then that the foreign settlements began to develop
which have gradually come to play the chief part in
the commercial and industrial and financial life of Egypt.
The French scientific mission which had accompanied
Napoleon's expedition to Egypt had struck his imagination,
and when he sent his sons to conquer the Sudan he
invited French savants to join them. He can hardly be
blamed if he was sometimes unable to discriminate
between vulgar adventurers and worthier representatives
of European culture. He lacked knowledge, though he
was eager for it, and whether in his varied friendships
or in his many speculative undertakings, it was his
inexperience rather than his usually sound instinct that
was his undoing. If he turned to Frenchmen for advice
and help in preference to Englishmen, it was but the
natural consequence of political developments that had
made him regard France rather than England as his
friend.
Though it was in the smashing defeat of the small
British force landed in Egypt in 1807 that Mehemet Ali
had laid the foundations of his fortune, he was too great
a soldier to overrate the significance of a success mainly
due to incompetent British leadership. He had seen
what British soldiers were capable of doing when he had
fought side by side with them under Abercrombie on his
first arrival in Egypt, and he had appreciated, as few
Orientals ever do, the value of British sea-power. As
far back as 1815 he had confided to the traveller Burckhardt,
who fell in with him in the heart of Arabia during
his Wahabi campaign, his belief that "England must
some day take Egypt as her share of the spoil of the
Turkish Empire." "For," as he put it with the rough
force of an Eastern proverb, "the big fish swallow the
veterans should be at once switched off for the conquest
of Egypt. As time passed, his apprehensions grew less,
and, like the Sultan, he learnt to speculate on the dissensions
of Europe. But he remained always reluctant
to incur the enmity of Great Britain. He was too clear-sighted
to ignore her interests in a country which lay
athwart her shortest line of communications with India
when steamers replaced sailing ships, and, instead of
nourishing resentment against her for her share in his
great discomfiture, he came round to the view that
Egypt's salvation might well lie in seeking to associate
her interests more closely with those of Great Britain
by recognising freely her right of way across Egyptian
territory and giving her increased facilities for using it.
The scheme for digging a ship canal between the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea, which had already appealed to the
imagination of Bonaparte, did not mature in Mehemet
Ali's days, but many years before Lesseps carried it
through it had found warm advocates amongst the
British rulers of India, and Mehemet Ali gave every
assistance to the Commission which went out in 1847
to study the question on the spot. If it was not carried
out under British auspices, the blame lies not on Mehemet
Ali but on the short-sighted opposition of our own people
at home. To his cordial co-operation a large measure
of credit may at any rate be given for the success which
in 1845 at last attended Waghorn's persevering efforts
to open up the "Overland Route" for mails and
passengers to India and China across the Delta through
Alexandria and Suez—an enterprise which prepared
the way for the Suez Canal. Waghorn in return defended
the cause of his great patron with unflagging devotion
in England, and he displayed not only his personal
gratitude, but perhaps greater political wisdom than
the British Ministers of the day possessed, when he
wrote a pamphlet on "Egypt in 1837," in which he
appealed to British members of Parliament "to show
to her interests which permits her to be sacrificed
to the bolstering up of Turkey."
Had Palmerston's mind not been obsessed with the
dread of Russia and jealousy of France, which drove him
at crucial moments to support the Sultan against Mehemet
Ali, it is conceivable that British influence, and with
it a broader and more liberal conception of economic
and administrative progress, would have gained a hold
on the great Pasha which might have transformed the
future history of Egypt. Many Frenchmen served him
well, but France had not the colonial experience which
Great Britain had already then acquired. French
statesmen thought only of courting Mehemet Ali's friendship
as that of a valuable chessman on the crowded board
of international diplomacy. What he did with his own
people they cared not at all. Had British statesmen
taken him in hand, they might have taught him the
principles which they themselves were beginning to
apply to the governance of the greatest of our own
Oriental dependencies, that the secret of strength lay
in the welfare and contentment of the masses. For
with all his faults, and imbued as he was with the traditions
of Oriental despotism, Mehemet Ali was easily
receptive of new ideas. In his own selfish way, he took
a genuine pride in the country to which his star had
guided him. "I love Egypt," he had told Burckhardt,
"with the ardour of a lover, and if I had ten thousand
lives, I would willingly sacrifice them all to possess her."
He did not make of Egypt a nation, for, himself an alien
by birth, the people of Egypt were so little to him that
he never even learnt to speak their language. Yet by
giving Egypt for the first time a place and a name in
modern history, and securing, at the cost of however
tremendous sacrifices, a measure of autonomy which at
least released her from the direct grip of predatory
Turkish officials, he created in the rising generations of
Egyptians a sense of pride in their country which became
to-day forget that the autonomy he wrung from the
Sublime Porte never meant freedom for their forefathers,
but only freedom for himself to rule them according to
his own will; that the chosen instruments of his will
remained for the most part aliens in stock and language
as he himself was; that he and his successors continued
to treat the Egyptian masses as their chattels until the
British Occupation; but the instinct is nevertheless not
wholly unsound which prompts them to look upon
Mehemet Ali as not only the creator of modern Egypt
but the pioneer of Egyptian Nationalism.
| THE EGYPTIAN PROBLEM The Egyptian problem | |