Egypt’s new khedive, Tawfiq Pasha (r. 1879–1892), was caught between the demands of Europe and powerful interest groups within his own society. He came to the vice-regal throne suddenly, when Britain and France prevailed upon the Ottoman sultan to depose his predecessor (and father), Khedive Ismail, for obstructing the work of their financial controllers in Egypt. Tawfiq Pasha thus knew better than to cross the European powers. Yet compliance with British and French demands had exposed him to growing criticism within Egypt. Large landholders and urban elites, chafing under the economic austerity measures imposed to repay Egypt’s foreign debts, grew increasingly outspoken against the khedive’s misrule. The Egyptian elites enjoyed a political platform in the Assembly of Delegates, the early Egyptian parliament established by Ismail Pasha in 1866. Their representatives in the Assembly began to demand a role in approving the Egyptian budget, increased ministerial responsibility to the Assembly, and a liberal constitution constraining the powers of the khedive. Tawfiq Pasha had neither the power nor the inclination to concede to such demands and, with the support of the European powers, suspended the Assembly in 1879. The landed elites responded by throwing their support behind a growing opposition movement in the Egyptian army. Egypt’s army had been hard hit by the austerity measures imposed after the country’s bankruptcy—particularly the Egyptians in the army. There was a deep divide in the army between the Turkish-speaking elite in the officer corps and the Arabic-speaking native-born Egyptians. The Turkish-speaking officers, known as Turco-Circassians, traced their origins to the Mamluks as a martial class. They had strong ties to the khedive’s household and to the Ottoman society of Istanbul. They held native-born Egyptians in low regard and spoke of them dismissively as peasant soldiers. When Egypt’s financial controllers decreed sharp cut-backs in the size of the Egyptian army, the Turco-Circassian commanders protected their own and imposed the cuts onto native-born Egyptian ranks. Egyptian officers rallied to their men?s cause and began to mobilize against unfair dismissal. They were led by one of the highest-ranking Egyptian officers, Colonel Ahmad Urabi. Ahmad Urabi (1841–1911) was one of the first native-born Egyptians to enter the officer corps. Born in a village of the eastern Nile Delta, Urabi left his studies at the mosque university of al-Azhar in 1854 to enter the new military academy opened by Said Pasha. Urabi believed himself no less qualified to be an officer than any Turco-Circassian of his generation. He claimed descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad on both his mother’s and his father’s side—in Islamic terms, a very illustrious lineage that no Mamluk could match, given their origins as Caucasian Christians converted to Islam as military slaves. A man of talent and ambition, Urabi achieved distinction, and his place in the history books, as a rebel, not as a soldier. Indeed, the revolt that bears his name was the event that precipitated the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In his memoirs Urabi idealized the army as a meritocracy, in which promotion was awarded through examination, “and those who excelled over their peers would be promoted to the appropriate rank.”¹² Urabi clearly performed well in examination. In just six years, between 1854 and 1860, he rose from a common soldier to become, at the age of nineteen, Egypt’s youngest colonel ever. Urabi was devoted to Said Pasha, the viceroy who had opened the oficer corps to native Egyptians. With the accession of Ismail Pasha in 1863, the new viceroy reverted to the traditional bias that privileged Turkish-speaking officers in the Egyptian army. Henceforth, patronage and ethnicity would displace merit as the basis of advancement in the military. The ambitious Urabi ran into a glass ceiling imposed by the Turco-Circassian elites. Through the whole of the sixteen-year reign of Ismail (r. 1863–1879), Urabi did not receive a single promotion. The experience embittered him against his superiors in the military and the viceroys of Egypt. Urabi’s conflict with the Turko-Circassian elites began almost immediately after Ismail ascended to power. Placed under the command of a Circassian general named Khusru Pasha, Urabi complained, “He showed a blind favouritism for men of his own race, and when he discovered me to be a pureblood [Egyptian] national, my presence in the regiment distressed him. He worked to have me discharged from the regiment, to free my post to be filled by one of the sons of the Mamluks.”¹³ Khusru Pasha’s opportunity came when Urabi was posted to the examination board responsible for promotions—the one institution that ensured soldiers were advanced by their merit rather than their connections. Khusru Pasha ordered Urabi to falsify exam results to promote a Circassian, and when Urabi refused, the general reported him to the minister of war for disobeying orders. The case was referred up to Khedive Ismail himself and led to Urabi’s temporary dismissal from the army and transfer to the civil service. Pardoned by the khedive in 1867, Urabi only returned to full military service at his former rank of colonel in the spring of 1870. Yet he still harbored deep resentments against his Turco-Circassian superiors and the injustice they had made him suffer. The 1870s were years of frustration for the Egyptian army. Urabi took part in the disastrous Abyssinian Campaign, when Khedive Ismail attempted to extend Egypt’s imperial rule over the modern territories of Somalia and Ethiopia. King John of Abyssinia dealt the Egyptians a decisive defeat in March 1876, driving the invaders from his lands. The demoralized army returned home having suffered heavy casualties and military disgrace abroad to face demobilization following the 1876 bankruptcy. As one of the economic measures imposed by the European financial controllers, the Egyptian army was to be trimmed from 15,000 to a token force of 7,000 men, and 2,500 officers were to be put on half pay. In January 1879, Urabi was ordered to move his regiment from Rosetta to Cairo for demobilization. When Urabi reached Cairo he found the city awash in Egyptian soldiers and officers awaiting demobilization. Feelings ran high among men facing the sudden end of promising military careers and imminent unemployment. A group of Egyptian army cadets and officers staged a demonstration outside the Ministry of Finance on February 18, 1879, to protest their unfair dismissal. When Prime Minister Nubar Pasha and the British minister, Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, emerged from the Ministry, the angry officers rough-handled the politicians. Urabi, who did not take part in the protest, later recounted to a British sympathizer, “They found Nubar getting into his carriage, and they assaulted him, pulled his moustache, and boxed his ears.”¹⁴ The military riot served Khedive Ismail’s purposes so well that Urabi and his colleagues suspected the viceroy of having a hand in organizing the demonstration. Ismail wanted to be rid of the French and British ministers in his cabinet and wanted greater latitude over Egypt’s budget. He argued that the stringent austerity the European financial advisors imposed were destabilizing Egypt’s internal politics and put in jeopardy its ability to honor its debts to foreign bondholders. The day after the military demonstration, Ismail accepted the resignation of Nubar’s mixed cabinet. However, the British and French were not about to indulge the khedive’s bid to regain his powers, and in June 1879 Ismail was deposed. Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers were relieved to see Khedive Ismail depart. Yet the position of Egyptian officers only deteriorated under his successor, Khedive Tawfiq. The new minister of war, a Turco-Circassian named Uthman Rifqi Pasha, removed a number of native Egyptian officers from their posts and replaced them with men of his race. In January 1881, Urabi learned that he and a number of his colleagues were about to be dismissed in an operation he described in terms of a Mamluk restoration. “The Circassians were holding regular meetings of high and low ranking officers in the home of Khusru Pasha [Urabi’s former Circassian commander], in the presence of Uthman Rifqi Pasha, in which they celebrated the history of the Mamluk state.... They believed they were ready to recover Egypt and all its possessions as those Mamluks had done.?¹⁵ Urabi and his colleagues decided to take action. They drafted a petition to Khedive Tawfiq setting out their grievances and demands. This petition of January 1881 marked Urabi’s entry into national politics, setting a dangerous precedent of military men intervening in politics that would recur through Arab history across the twentieth century. Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers had three main objectives: to increase the size of the Egyptian army, overturning the cuts in troop numbers imposed by the financial controllers; to revise the regulations and establish equality among all military men without distinction by ethnicity or religion; and to appoint a native-born Egyptian officer as minister of war. Urabi seemed unaware of the contradiction between these demands, for equality and the preference of a native Egyptian minister. Urabi’s demands were revolutionary for their time. When the officers’ petition was submitted to the prime minister, Riyad Pasha, he openly threatened the officers. “This petition is destructive,” he warned, “more dangerous than the petition submitted by one of your colleagues who was subsequently sent to the Sudan,” Egypt’s equivalent to Siberia.¹⁶ Yet the officers refused to withdraw their petition and asked that it be brought to the khedive’s attention. When the khedive received Urabi’s petition, he convened an emergency session in Abdin Palace with his top military commanders. They called for the arrest of Urabi and the two officers who had signed the petition on charges of sedition, and agreed to convene a special court-martial to try the men. Urabi and his fellow officers were summoned to the Ministry of War the following day, where they were told to surrender their swords. On their way to the prison, which was located inside the ministry, the Egyptians passed through two ranks of hostile Circassian officers, and they were taunted at their prison door by Urabi’s old nemesis, Khusru Pasha. “He stood outside the cell and taunted us as ‘peasants [suitable only for] working as fruit pickers,’” Urabi recalled with bitterness.¹⁷ The arrest of Urabi and his fellow officers provoked a mutiny in the Egyptian army. In February 1881 two units of the Khedivial Guard stormed the Ministry of War. The minister and the other Circassians fled the building. The soldiers released Urabi and his officers from their cell and led them back to Abdin Palace, where they held a noisy demonstration of loyalty to Khedive Tawfiq. The soldiers remained in Abdin Square until the unpopular Circassian minister of war, Uthman Rifqi, was dismissed and a man of their choice named his successor. The khedive also issued orders for changes in the military regulations to satisfy the soldiers’ requests on pay and terms of service. The demonstration then broke up, and the troops returned to their barracks. Calm had been restored, but the events had transformed Egyptian politics. Urabi emerged as a popular leader, and the military had forced the khedive and his government to accept their demands.