Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  But the Colonels overruled the aristocrats and the clerics. The next morning, Urabi sent Tawfik a letter containing the National Party’s demands. He ended with an ultimatum that if Tawfik had not answered by lunchtime, then the colonels would march on Abdin Palace.26

  Tawfik panicked. Most of the ministers and foreign consuls had left Cairo to avoid the stifling late summer heat. Only one controller was on hand. Sir Auckland Colvin knew little of Egypt, but had long experience of native effrontery in India. He and Riaz Pasha advised Tawfik to meet Urabi’s insolent demands with an ambush. When the rebels marched onto the parade ground in front of Abdin Palace, troops loyal to the government should open fire from the palace windows. The khedive and his advisers spent the morning racing around Cairo, trying to rally regiments loyal to the government. Their last stop was Urabi’s barracks. When they got there, they found that they were too late. Urabi had already left for Abdin Palace.

  Khedive Tawfik sneaked back by side roads and slipped into his palace by a back door. When he looked out of a front window, he saw that the parade ground contained twenty-five hundred soldiers and eighteen field guns, all pointed at the palace. Every regiment in Cairo had broken its oath. Not a single soldier had sided with him.

  On the parade ground, the troops stacked their rifles and stood at ease, cracking pistachios and rolling cigarettes. The colonels waited on their horses for the khedive. It was the height of the tourist season. Curious visitors wandered over from the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens to watch.

  Tawfik emerged from a doorway, followed by Sir Auckland Colvin and a few brave attendants. As they walked toward the troops, Colvin kept muttering advice. Tawfik should order Urabi to surrender his pistol, and then shoot him with it. Tawfik should order Urabi to give up his sword, and then walk with the colonel from regiment to regiment, ordering them back to barracks.

  Tawfik had no intention of following Colvin’s advice. He was terrified.

  Colonel Urabi rode up to them, backed by infantrymen with bayonets fixed. Tawfik ordered him to dismount. Lowering his heavy frame to the ground, Urabi marched forward and saluted. His sword stood between his face and the khedive’s.

  “Now is your moment,” hissed Sir Auckland Colvin. “Give the word!”

  Tawfik froze. “We are between four fires,” he whispered. “We shall be killed.”

  “Have courage!”

  “We are between four fires,” Tawfik repeated, turning to Colvin and his attendants as if in apology.

  He ordered Urabi to put his sword away. Urabi seemed relieved. His hand shook so much that he had trouble finding the scabbard. Tawfik walked up to him and demanded an explanation.

  “I am the khedive of the country, and shall do as I please,” the khedive warned.

  “We are not slaves, and never shall be from this day forth,” replied Urabi.27

  Sir Auckland Colvin could not believe his ears. The khedive was haggling in public with a rebellious colonel. He suggested they withdraw to the palace.

  While Tawfik recovered in an anteroom, the British consul menaced Urabi with the threat of military intervention. But Urabi insisted that his troops demonstrated not against Turkey or Britain, but for the liberty of the Egyptian people. When Urabi repeated his demands to Tawfik, the khedive caved in. The Riaz Pasha cabinet would be dissolved. Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi would return to the War Ministry, and Urabi would be his undersecretary. The army would be expanded to eighteen thousand men, and there would be no more discrimination. The Chamber of Notables would hold elections and prepare a constitution. Tawfik and Urabi appeared on a balcony. The troops cheered and the marching bands struck up. Urabi kissed Tawfik’s hand.

  The soldiers returned to their barracks. The revolt had achieved its object, and in time for the military band to give its customary afternoon concert in front of the New Continental Hotel. Once again, the colonels had intimidated Tawfik and bluffed the British and French. They had won the war, but their supposed ally Sharif Pasha had his own plans for the peace.

  The next morning, a special train brought Sharif Pasha back to Cairo. He had watched from his estate while Urabi cleared a path to the palace. True to Turkish habit, he had no intention of sharing power. When he met Urabi, he insisted that Urabi place the army under his orders. Urabi refused. This gave Sharif an excuse to exclude the colonels from influence over his government. He pacified Urabi with a promise to expand the army and bought off Mohammed Abdu by loosening control over the press. Calling an election, he rigged its results, packing the Chamber of Notables with pliant Turkish landowners.

  “The Egyptians are children, and must be treated like children,” Sharif said. “It was I who created the National Party.”28

  AFTER FINISHINGThe Future of Islam, Wilfrid Blunt returned to Egypt as the new Chamber of Notables convened. Previously, Blunt had discounted Colonel Urabi as a force for progress. Mohammed Abdu had convinced him that reform would come from Islam, not the army. The British press had depicted Urabi as a budding dictator, and the National Party as a screen for a military takeover. But Philip Currie, Blunt’s cousin at the Foreign Office, demurred, hinting, “Perhaps you might find in Urabi just the man you have been looking for.”29

  Blunt found Urabi at a barracks outside Cairo. Petitioners waiting to see The Only One spilled from the waiting room into the doorway. Urabi now styled himself Ahmed Urabi al-Misri: “Ahmed Urabi the Egyptian,” his people’s Everyman. Urabi admitted that he had not read Lord Byron’s poetry, but esteemed his work for Greek liberty. He promised Blunt that the army’s involvement in politics would end as soon as possible. “We have won for the people their right to speak, in an Assembly of Notables, and we keep the ground of it to prevent their being cajoled or frightened out of it.”30

  Sharif Pasha having betrayed his allies in the National Party, both Urabi and Abdu were trying to work out how to recover the initiative. Blunt suggested to Abdu that they appeal directly to Britain over Sharif Pasha’s head, by drawing up a National Party program and dispatching it to London. Britain’s new Liberal premier, William Gladstone, loathed Turkey for the savagery of its repression of Christian minorities in the Balkans. He had campaigned on an ethical foreign policy. Blunt felt “certain” that he would recognize the legitimate aspiration of the Egyptians for freedom.31

  Abdu agreed. Blunt’s plan would bypass Sharif and the notables, and return the National Party to its true founders. Blunt and Abdu composed a program, and showed it to Urabi and Mahmoud Sami al-Barudi, the minister of war. They approved, and Blunt sent it to 10 Downing Street and the Times.

  Moderately, the National Party accepted the sultan as its caliph. Radically, it promised to fight for its “national rights and privileges.” Moderately, the party expressed “loyal allegiance” to Tawfik. Radically, it conditioned this allegiance on Tawfik’s “exact execution” of the promised “parliamentary government,” and warned him against continuing his “despotic power.” Moderately, the party recognized the Dual Control as “a necessity of their financial position,” and the debt as “a matter of national honour.” Radically, it rejected the Control’s method: direct control of Egypt’s finances. Moderately, the Nationalists disavowed violence, but radically they hailed the army as “the armed guardians of the unarmed people,” and “the only power in the country” capable of establishing constitutional government.

  The National Party insisted it was a pluralist movement, “a political, not a religious party.” Its government would make no distinction between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, “holding all men to be brothers and to have equal rights.” This clause, a revolutionary break with the sharia law and the dhimmi status by which the Ottomans had governed religious minorities, had the approval of the sheikhs of al-Azhar, “holding the true law of Islam to forbid religious hatred and religious disabilities.” To demonstrate its tolerance, the National Party also had “no quarrel” with European residents, providing they would “live conformably with the laws and bear their share of the burdens of the State”; i
n other words, if they forsook the Capitulations and the Mixed Courts, and their tax exemptions.

  Having vaulted over Islamic tradition and the Capitulations, the program soared into Utopia. “The general end of the National Party is the intellectual and moral regeneration of the country by a better observance of the law, by increased education, and by political liberty, which they hold to be the life of the people. They trust in the sympathy of those of the nations of Europe which enjoy the blessing of self-government to aid Egypt in gaining for itself that blessing.” Again Blunt could not resist confrontation. “But they are aware no nation ever yet achieved liberty except by its own endeavours; and they are resolved to stand firm in the position they have won.”32

  There was no more talk of gradual reforms and cautious constitutionalism. Excited by Urabi’s image of the army as the irresistible guarantor of Arab liberty, and unable to resist his poet’s fluency, Blunt had composed a direct challenge to British influence in Egypt. He had even twisted Urabi’s surname in translation, calling him “Arabi,” the embodiment of Arabs everywhere.

  LORD “PUSSY” GRANVILLE, Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote a note to Prime Minister Gladstone. “It will be desirable for us to have a little talk about Egypt.”33

  5

  Egypt for the Egyptians!

  1882

  William Ewart Gladstone, M.P.

  Remember that He, who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that the mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island; is not limited by the boundaries of the Christian civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the Earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.

  —William Gladstone, M.P., 1879

  MR. GLADSTONE LIVED by his conscience. It commanded a life of Christian service. At first it called him to the Church, but then it led him into the Commons. He followed its summons into the Tory Party, and then across the floor and into the Liberal Party. It guided him through an ideological struggle with Benjamin Disraeli, and it advised him not to attend Disraeli’s funeral. It compelled him to broaden the electoral system, to bring aid to suffering Lancashire mill workers, to advocate Home Rule for the Irish, and to support the Confederacy in the American Civil War. It sent him at night into the streets of London to pick up prostitutes and exhort them to turn to God, and when a less spiritual urge raised its head, it obliged him to flagellate himself afterward.

  In 1881, the “Grand Old Man” was seventy years old, a straight-backed, fierce-eyed prophet whose iron chin jutted over the high wing collar of a passing generation. Liberals compared his craggy face to an eagle’s, and Tories to a hawk’s. The greatest orator of the age, Gladstone relaxed by reading theology, chopping down trees, and walking miles across rough country. Even his hair defied time, springing up in wild clumps despite lashings of Macassar oil. After four decades in Parliament, Gladstone’s conscience had shaped liberal England as surely as his political talent had shaped the Liberal Party. He never stopped inspecting both for impurities of egotism and greed.

  Family money from Caribbean sugar plantations had dispatched young William to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and then to a “rotten borough” Tory seat in the Commons. The young High Tory had opposed the emancipation of British slaves and condemned electoral reform. In his second decade in Parliament, Gladstone had served Palmerston as the chancellor who found the funds for the Crimean War. But then conscience demanded a breach. Converted to social and electoral reform, he left the Tories. When the Liberals won the 1868 election, Gladstone became their prime minister.

  “It has been experience which has altered my politics,” he explained. Gladstone struggled constantly to reconcile Christianity with modern thought and modern society. In the 1870s, that meant a personalized battle with Disraeli. They had been antithetical. While Disraeli planted an arboretum on his estate, as if lending permanence to his ennoblement as the earl of Beaconsfield, Gladstone turned down an earldom and delighted in taking an axe to an unworthy tree. While Disraeli wrote novels, idealistically glossing the relations between Church and State in Coningsby or the religious implications of empire in Tancred, Gladstone reflected on his favorite subjects—religion, politics, and classical literature—at joyless length with titles like The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, The State and its Relations with the Church, and Homeric Synchronism. Gladstone thought Disraeli “hopelessly false.” Disraeli called Gladstone “a sophisticated rhetorician, intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”1

  Queen Victoria preferred “Dizzy,” with his charming patter and sensitivity to her widowhood, to Gladstone, with his starchy clergyman’s manner and his presumption to know the conscience of an empress. It was the question of empire that caused the bitterest split of all. Disraeli had modernized Palmerston’s view that Britain must keep the Pax Britannica in a malevolent world: In the face of spreading competition, Britain’s global interests now required protection through formal empire. Gladstone was an idealist. He believed that the “operations of Commerce” created “the amity of nations”: Free Trade created a rational interest in peace. If needed, the Concert of Europe could correct bellicose “lusts and appetites” through collective action based on Christian principle. The “great moral purpose of the repression of human passion” was secured not by tyranny, but by spreading commerce, consensus, and “public law.” His critics called him a “Little Englander,” ignorant of “over-sea” matters.2

  Turned out of office by Disraeli in 1874, Gladstone attempted to retire. Yet he could not resist politics, with its high principles and profane intrigues. The Eastern Question fascinated Gladstone like the prostitutes he intercepted on the road to Hell: alluring, guilt-inducing, and redeemable. It was Gladstone’s “noble” duty to sustain Britain as a Christian, nonexpansionist member of the international community. “The curtain rising in the East seems to open events that bear cardinally on our race.”3

  Two years after retiring, Gladstone returned to the stage. He struck at the weak point of Disraeli’s Eastern strategy: its ethics. In March 1876, Turkish troops repressing the Christian nationalists of Bulgaria massacred fifteen thousand men, women, and children. In Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, Gladstone savaged Ottoman rule as “like a deluge of blood rained from the windows of heaven,” and Disraeli for having allied Britain with heathen tyranny. Disraeli held to his policy. He installed the Dual Control in the Egyptian government and further entwined Britain and Turkey in the Treaty of Berlin. Gladstone, his politics and principles converging, chose the unfamiliar ground of foreign policy as the battlefield of the 1880 election. As a less couth candidate put it, the liberal public must unite against “Jingoes, Jugglers, and Jews.”4

  In the winter of 1879, the great orator launched the first modern election campaign, using public set pieces, print media, and rapid transport. Trailed by a horde of journalists, Gladstone toured his Scottish constituency of Midlothian, addressing thousands of voters at every stop. He had always excelled on the soapbox, but his real audience was the newly educated and enfranchised public who would read his speeches over breakfast the next morning. In the spring of 1880, he mounted a second tour, using the railway to target key constituencies from London to Edinburgh.

  From “the highest grounds of principle” Gladstone assailed the “pernicious fanaticism” of Disraeli’s foreign adventures: war in Afghanistan, annexations in Fiji, Cyprus, and Africa, and the shaming alliance with the “cruel and grinding oppression” of Ottoman Turkey. The public must resist Disraeli’s “hoodwinking,” his “theatrical” costuming of Queen Victoria as an empress, his “gratuitous, dangerous, ambiguous, impracticable and impossible” engagements. The Suez Canal shares were “a mere delusion.” Cyprus was “a valueless encumbrance.” Turkey repressed minorities with a cruelty “perhaps entirely unequalled in the history of mankind.” Disraeli’s imperial strategy was a “monstrous” recipe for permanent
preemptive war: “A little island at one end of the world, having possessed itself of an enormous territory at the other end of the world, is entitled to say with respect to every land and every sea lying between its own shores and any part of that enormous possession, that it has a preferential right to the possession or control of that intermediate territory, in order, as it is called, to safeguard the road to India.”5

  “Do not suffer appeals to national pride to blind you to the dictates of justice,” he declaimed. “Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.”6

  Disraeli had invoked ancient Rome as an ideal of “Empire and Liberty,” but the days of the Caesars would not be returning under a Gladstone government. “Modern times have brought a different state of things. Modern times have established a sisterhood of nations, equal, independent; each of them built up under that legitimate defence which public law affords to every nation, living within its own borders, and seeking to perform its own affairs.” Britain must stand for “the equal rights of all nations” and must “always be inspired by a love of freedom.”7

  The public returned the Liberals to power, and Gladstone to Downing Street, but the Liberals were a coalition in all but name. On one side were the Whig aristocrats who had founded the party. On the other were the middle-class Radicals who knew how to speak to the new voters. At the pivot was Gladstone, eloquent incarnation of the liberal, Free Trading inheritance. He would need all his eloquence. On the big issues, Ireland and empire, the cabinet divided not along the Whig-Radical split, but rather along personal beliefs. Alliances formed and broke on single issues. At times, Gladstone had more in common with a rogue Tory like Lord Randolph Churchill, anti-imperial and pro–Home Rule, than with his own ministers. After the election, Gladstone hoped to drop his opportunistic focus on “over-sea” and concentrate on granting Home Rule to Ireland. But Britain’s accumulated interest in the Eastern Question soon drew Gladstone’s ethical foreign policy into the Egyptian quagmire.