Nationalist politicians in Egypt also believed they could achieve their independence from Britain at the Paris Peace Conference. Mislead by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Egyptian political establishment thought that Paris would inaugurate a new world order. They believed the age of empire would be replaced by a new community of nations created through the exercise of national self-determination. And, like Britain?s Hashemite allies, the Egyptians believed they had earned their independence after the wartime hardship they had suffered for Britain. Following thirty-six years of British rule, the First World War had served only to entrench Britain’s imperial presence in Egypt. The British unilaterally declared Egypt a protectorate in December 1914, deposing the reigning khedive Abbas II for having “adhered to the King’s enemies” (he was in Istanbul at the time). As Egypt was no longer an Ottoman vassal state, its ruler was no longer a viceroy. The deposed khedive was replaced by his uncle, Husayn Kamil, the eldest member of the line of Muhammad ’Ali, with the new title of sultan. The British hoped to undermine the influence of the Ottoman sultan by promoting the Egyptian sultan, just as they hoped Sharif Husayn’s call for a revolt against the Ottomans would undermine the sultan’s call to jihad against Britain and France. This stratagem had little impact on Muslims in Egypt or the broader Muslim community, who continued to revere the Ottoman sultan in his role as caliph, or leader of the global Islamic community. Once war began, the burden of Egypt’s support for the British fell most heavily on the working people of Egypt. Crops were requisitioned for the war effort, and peasants were recruited to serve in labor teams to provide logistical support on the western front. Inflation and shortage of goods had reduced living standards for all, and many Egyptians were left impoverished. Cairo and Alexandria were flooded with British and Commonwealth soldiers who assembled and trained in Egypt before being dispatched to conflict in Gallipoli and Palestine. The flood of soldiers raised tensions with the local population, who believed that the presence of more Britons inevitably meant less independence. As the war drew to a close, Woodrow Wilson’s message of national self-determination fell on fertile ground in the Nile Valley. The Egyptians believed that through their many contributions to a war not of their making, they had earned the right of self-determination. On November 13, 1918, only two days after the armistice ending the First World War, a group of respected Egyptian political figures called on the British high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, to demand complete independence for their country. The group was headed by Sa’d Zaghlul, the Azhar-trained follower of Muhammad Abduh who served as minister of education and vice president of the Egyptian Legislative Assembly. Zaghlul, a member of the prewar People’s Party, had emerged as the leader of the nationalist opposition to the British presence in Egypt. He was accompanied by two other nationalists, Abd al-Aziz Fahmi and Ali Sha’rawi. Wingate received the men, heard their request, and refused out of hand. Not only were the Egyptians forbidden to send a delegation to Paris to press their claim before the Peace Conference, but he refused to recognize Zaghlul’s right to speak on behalf of Egyptian national aspirations. After all, no one had elected Zaghlul to be Egypt?s spokesman. The Egyptian delegation did not take Wingate’s refusal sitting down. Zaghlul and his colleagues left the High Commission and promptly set about securing their mandate to speak on behalf of Egyptian national aspirations. They drafted a petition asking that Zaghlul and his delegation be allowed to travel to Paris and present Egypt’s case before the Peace Conference as Amir Faysal was doing for Syria. Activists traveled across the whole of Egypt securing signatures. In spite of official obstruction by British officials and the confiscation of signed copies of the petition, the nationalists succeeded in gathering impressive support for Zaghlul’s movement. Copies of the petition were sent to local elected bodies, provincial councils, and other notables, and in a short time, hundreds of thousands of signatures poured in.²² People across Egypt rallied to Sa’d Zaghlul’s cause, impatient to secure their independence from Britain at the Paris Peace Conference. As the movement gained ground, the British tried to put a stop to the nationalist agitation by making Paris irrelevant to the Egyptian question. Wingate announced that any change in the status of Egypt would be treated by His Majesty’s government as “an imperial and not an international question.” In other words, Zaghlul and his colleagues would have to discuss their ambitions with the British government in Whitehall, as an imperial question, rather than argue Egypt’s case to the world in Paris. The British administration gave Zaghlul a direct warning to stop his agitation. When he disregarded the British warning, Zaghlul and his principal colleagues were arrested on March 8, 1919, and deported to Malta. The result was a nationwide uprising that marked the beginning of Egypt’s Revolution of 1919.

The public response to the arrest of Sa’d Zaghlul and his colleagues was immediate and violent. The country rose up in a combination of spontaneous and planned revolts that spread from the urban centers to the countryside and involved all levels of Egyptian society. The demonstrations began on March 9 when a group of students rioted and vandalized the infrastructure they associated with British rule, such as trains, trams, and lamp posts. The anti-British demonstrations and their repression by British forces left many dead and wounded on both sides. The ancient mosque university of al-Azhar became one of the nerve centers of the uprising. After British forces arrested a number of teachers and students from al-Azhar on March 13, the British chief of security, Joseph McPherson, visited the mosque to observe the political agitation firsthand. Wearing only a fez for a disguise and receiving unfriendly looks from the Egyptians around him, McPherson could not get through the front door of the mosque because the crowd was so large. Yet even from his limited vantage point he could see a religious shaykh inside the mosque ?haranguing an audience of many hundreds from the top of a pile of stones, telling them that they must scorn death itself in their efforts to destroy the tyrant, and throw off his yoke, and promising Paradise to ?Martyrs? in the holy cause.? McPherson saw money being collected by the Central Revolutionary Committee to raise the revolt in the countryside.²³ Rural communities also struck against those things they associated with British rule—the produce depots and railway facilities through which their requisitioned crops were transported during wartime were sabotaged, along with the telegraph lines that provided administrators with efficient communications. In the cities themselves, the urban working classes resorted to industrial action. The Egyptian state railway went on strike. The Cairo tramways went on strike. McPherson, the British security chief, catalogued the participants in the uprising, from schoolboys to street sweepers, with mounting disdain: “howling lunatics in the streets, women emancipated for the occasion making stump orations, children and rapscallions of all sorts shouting ribald doggerels in contempt of the fallen tyrants.” The Egyptians remember 1919 differently. It was for many their first opportunity to take part in the political life of their nation. They were united in a common belief that the Egyptians should rule over their own country without foreign interference. It was the first real nationalist movement in Arab history, in which nationalist leaders enjoyed the full support of the masses, from the countryside to the cities. The women of Egypt made their entry into national politics for the first time in 1919. Their leader was a woman named Huda Sha‘rawi. The daughter of a Circassian mother and an elderly Egyptian notable, Huda Sha’rawi (1879–1947) was born into privilege and confinement. Raised in the harem of an elite Cairo household, she grew up surrounded by women, children, and eunuchs. In her memoirs, she writes of two mothers—her father’s first wife, whom she called “Big Mother,” and her own mother. She loved them both but felt particularly close to Big Mother, who “knew how I felt when people favoured my brother over me because he was a boy.”²⁴ As a child, Sha’rawi resented being given less education than her young brother. A devoted student, she pressed her tutor to bring her grammar books so that she might learn to read the Qur’an properly. “Take your book back,” the children’s eunuch told the tutor. “The young lady has no need of grammar as she will not become a judge!” Huda was despondent. “I became depressed and began to neglect my studies, hating being a girl because it kept me from the education I sought. Later, being a female became a barrier between me and the freedom for which I yearned.”²⁵ While still a teen, Huda learned to her dismay that she was to become the second wife of an elderly cousin named Ali Pasha Sha’rawi. “I was deeply troubled by the idea of marrying my cousin whom I had always regarded as a father or older brother deserving my fear and respect. I grew more upset when I thought of his wife and three daughters who were all older than me, who used to tease me saying, ?Good-day, stepmother!??²⁶ She went to her bridal bed like “a condemned person approaching execution.” Not surprisingly, the marriage was not a happy one and the couple was soon estranged. They spent seven years apart, which gave Huda a chance to mature and develop her own interests before returning to her husband and resuming her role as the wife of an influential man. The years of her marital estrangement proved a period of political development for Huda Sha‘rawi. She began to organize public activities for women. She invited a French feminist, Marguerite Clement, to give a lecture in the Egyptian University, comparing the lives of eastern and western women and discussing social practices such as veiling. This first lecture gave rise to a regular series in which Egyptian women began to speak, including the Egyptian feminist Malak Hifni Nasif (1886–1918), the first Egyptian woman to make public demands for the liberation of women.²⁷ In April 1914, Sha’rawi convened a meeting to establish the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women, a literary society that brought together some of the pioneers of women’s literature in the Arab world, including the Lebanese writer Mai Ziyada, and Labiba Hashim, the founder of one of the earliest women’s magazines. These activities marked the beginning of a distinct women’s movement in Egypt, to which Sha’rawi would dedicate the rest of her life. Lectures and women’s meetings broadened the scope of elite women’s participation in cultural affairs in Cairo and provided forums for women to meet and discuss issues of their own choosing without having first to seek their husbands’ permission. Such limited gains were significant in their own right, but the social conventions dictating gender roles had hardly been affected. To challenge such deeply entrenched customs as had long divided men and women in Arab and Ottoman society would take a revolution. The uprising of 1919 proved as much a social as a political revolution. The spring of 1919 was a time when strict social divides were challenged and briefly overturned. The nationalist struggle provided the opportunity for women to emerge as political actors in Egypt, and left an enduring feminist movement as a legacy. At a more personal level, these events helped Ali Pasha Sha’rawi to reconcile with his wife Huda, and to turn their marriage into a political partnership united by the nationalist cause. Ali Pasha Sha‘rawi had been involved in the nationalist movement since Sa’d Zaghlul’s fateful 1918 meeting with the British high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, which he attended. With Zaghlul, he was a founding member of the nationalist party that came to be known as the Wafd, or “delegation,” seeking to represent Egypt’s aspirations before the Paris Peace Conference. When Zaghlul was exiled, Sha’rawi took over party leadership. Ali Pasha’s relationship with his wife Huda changed dramatically in the course of the revolution. He kept Huda fully briefed on all political developments so that, in the event of his arrest, she could help fill the political vacuum. Furthermore, they soon learned that there were things women could do with impunity because the British did not dare to arrest them or fire upon them for fear of provoking public outrage. The Wafd were quick to seize upon the advantages of mobilizing women for the nationalist cause. The first women’s demonstration took place on March 16, just one week after the outbreak of the revolution. Black placards with slogans in Arabic and French painted in white letters—the colors of mourning—were prepared. The demonstrators then gathered in central Cairo, planning to march to the United States legation as if to claim the right of self-determination Woodrow Wilson promised in his Fourteen Points. Before they could reach their destination, the women demonstrators found their way blocked by British troops. “They blocked the streets with machine guns,” Huda Sha’rawi wrote, “forcing us to stop along with the students who had formed columns on both sides of us. I was determined the demonstration should resume. When I advanced, a British soldier stepped toward me pointing his gun, but I made my way past him. As one of the women tried to pull me back, I shouted in a loud voice, ‘Let me die so Egypt shall have an Edith Cavell’ [an English nurse shot and killed by the Germans during the First World War, who became an instant martyr].” After a three-hour stand-off, the demonstration broke up without violence. Further demonstrations were to follow. The symbolic power of Egyptian women facing down the British encouraged nationalists across the country. Once outside of their harems, Egyptian women threw themselves into public life with great energy and commitment. They raised funds for the needy, visited the wounded in the hospital, and attended rallies and protests, often exposing themselves to great danger. Women also began to cross the class barrier, as elite women made common cause with working-class women. Huda noted the deaths of six working-class women in the course of the nationalist movement as a “focus of intense national mourning.” Women did all they could to encourage the civil servants’ strike, standing outside government offices and urging workers to defy the British and stay away from work. When Britain sent a commission of enquiry under Lord Milner at the end of 1919, Egyptian women organized another round of demonstrations and drafted a resolution in protest. They began to hold mass meetings attended by hundreds of women of all classes. At the end of 1919, Huda Sha‘rawi and her colleagues consolidated their feminist gains by organizing the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee, the first women’s political body in the Arab world. Huda Sha’rawi was elected its president. Sha’rawi went on to cofound the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, and she shattered the conventions of women’s confinement that same year when she and her colleagues removed their veils publicly at the Cairo Railway Station on their return from a feminist conference in Rome. Egypt?s feminist movement long outlived the revolutionary moment of 1919.