Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Having secured the consent of the other European powers to colonize Morocco, the French shifted their focus to French-Moroccan relations. The sharifs of Morocco had ruled independently of both the Ottoman Empire and the states of Europe in an uninterrupted line since 1511. From 1860 onward, however, the European powers increasingly interfered with the politics and economy of the ancient sultanate. Morocco had also undergone a series of state-led reforms during the reign of Moulay Hasan (r. 1873–1894), in a now-familiar bid to check European penetration by adopting European technology and ideas. Predictably, the results were greater European penetration and a weakening of the national treasury through expensive military and infrastructural projects. The reforming sultan, Moulay Hasan, was succeeded by the fourteen-year-old Moulay Abd al-Aziz (r. 1894–1908), who lacked the maturity and experience to steer Morocco through rival European ambitions to preserve its sovereignty and independence. France was now actively exploiting the ill-defined boundary between Algeria and Morocco to send soldiers into Moroccan territory on the pretext of halting tribal incursions. While encroaching on the territory of Morocco, the French entangled the sultan’s government in public loans. In 1904 the French government negotiated a 62.5 million francs loan ($12.5 million) from Parisian banks, furthering France’s economic penetration of Morocco. Moroccans resented the expanding French presence in their country, and they began to attack foreign commercial ventures. The French retaliated by occupying Moroccan towns—most notoriously, Casablanca was bombarded from the sea and occupied by 5,000 troops in 1907 after a violent attack on a French-owned factory. As the French encroached deeper into Morocco, the people began to lose confidence in their sultan. His own brother, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, launched a rebellion against him, forcing him to abdicate and seek French protection in 1908. Following his successful rebellion, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz (r. 1907–1912) succeeded his brother to the throne. However, Abd al-Hafiz was no more effective at staving off European encroachment than his brother had been. The sultan’s last ally in Europe was Germany, which sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir in July 1911 in a last bid to halt French expansion in Morocco. But the Agadir crisis was ultimately resolved at Morocco’s expense. In return for France’s agreement to cede territory in the French Congo to Germany, the kaiser’s government acquiesced to French ambitions in Morocco. The French occupation of Morocco was completed in March 1912, when Moulay Abd al-Hafiz signed the Fez Convention establishing a French protectorate over Morocco. Though the sharifs remained on the throne—indeed, the current king, Mohammad VI, is their lineal descendant—formal control over Morocco devolved to the French Empire for the next forty-four years. And France could finally forgive Britain for its occupation of Egypt.

Libya was the last territory in North Africa still under direct Ottoman rule, and by the time France had secured its protectorate over Morocco, Italy was already at war with the Ottoman Empire for its possession. While nominally part of the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, the two Libyan provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica had been under direct Ottoman control only since the 1840s—and the Porte ruled Libya with a very light touch. The two provincial capitals, Tripoli and Benghazi, were garrison towns in which the Ottoman presence was limited to a handful of officials and the soldiers needed to keep the peace. After the French occupation of Tunisia and the British occupation of Egypt, however, the Ottomans placed growing strategic value on their Libyan provinces. Following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which brought a new group of nationalists to power in the Ottoman Empire, the government in Istanbul began to take active measures to limit Italian encroachment in Libya, blocking Italians from buying land or owning factories in Tripoli and Cyrenaica. The Ottomans sought by all means to avoid losing their last grip on North Africa to European imperial ambition. For decades, the other European powers had been promising Libya to Italy—the British in 1878, the Germans in 1888, and the French in 1902. Clearly the other European states expected Italy to find a peaceful means of adding Libya to its possessions. Instead, the Italians chose to enter Libya with all guns blazing. They declared war on the Ottomans on September 29, 1911, on the pretext of alleged abuse of Italian subjects in the Libyan provinces. The Ottomans in Libya mounted a stiff resistance to the invaders, so the Italians decided to take their war to the Ottoman heartlands. Italian ships bombarded Beirut in February 1912, attacked Ottoman positions in the Straits of the Dardanelles in April, and occupied Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in April–May 1912, wreaking havoc with the strategic balance in the Eastern Mediterranean. The other European powers leaped into diplomatic action to contain the damage, fearing the Italians might set off a war in the volatile Balkans (indeed, they had been fanning the flames of the Albanian nationalist movement against the Ottomans). Italy was only too willing to allow the European conference system to settle the Libyan question. Its troops had been tied down by intense resistance from both the small Turkish garrisons and the local population in Libya and had not extended their control from the coastline to the inland regions. Peace was restored at the price of the Ottomans’ final North African territory. The European states served as mediators between the Ottomans and Italians, and a formal peace treaty was concluded in October 1912, conceding Libya to Italian imperial rule. Yet even after the Ottoman troops withdrew, the Italians faced sustained resistance from the Libyans themselves, who continued their fight against foreign rule into the 1930s.

By the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties. European rules came to replace Ottoman rules, with significant consequences for the societies of North Africa. So much of imperial history is written from the perspective of high politics and international diplomacy. Yet for the people of North Africa, imperialism changed their lives in very important ways. One person?s experiences can shed light on what these changes meant for his society at large. The intellectual Ahmad Amin (1886–1954) was born in Cairo four years after the British began their occupation of Egypt and died two years before the British withdrew. Colonial Egypt was all he ever knew. In the course of his education at al-Azhar and his early career as a school teacher, Ahmad Amin encountered many of the leading intellectual figures of his age. He met some of the most influential Islamic reformers of the day and witnessed the emergence of nationalist movements and political parties in Egypt. He saw the women of Egypt emerge from seclusion of veils and harems to enter public life. And he reflected on these tumultuous changes in his autobiography, written at the end of a successful life as a university professor and literary figure.²⁸ Young Ahmad grew up in a rapidly changing world, and the generation gap separating him from his father, an Islamic scholar, was striking. His father, who passed between the academic life of al-Azhar and the demands of leading prayers in Imam al-Shafi’i mosque, lived in an age of Islamic certainties. Ahmad’s generation was shaped by new ideas and innovations, including newspapers, for which journalists played a key role in shaping public opinion. Ahmad Amin began reading newspapers as a young school teacher, frequenting a cafй that provided newspapers for its clientele. As Amin explained, each newspaper was known for its political orientation. Amin usually chose a conservative, Islamic-oriented paper in keeping with his own personal values, though he was familiar with both the nationalist and the pro-imperialist papers of his day.

Introduced to Egypt in the 1820s, printing presses were among the first industrial goods imported into the Middle East. Muhammad ‘Ali sent one of his earliest technical missions to Milan, Italy, to acquire both the knowledge and technology of printing presses. Soon after, the Egyptian government began to publish an official gazette, which was the first periodical published in Arabic. Its primary objective was “to improve the performance of the honourable governors and other distinguished officials in charge of [public] affairs and interests.”²⁹ Between 1842 and 1850, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, author of the celebrated study of Paris, served as editor of this official newspaper, the Arabic title of which meant “Egyptian Events.” It took several decades before private entrepreneurs began to launch newspapers, though many of these papers came under indirect government control. Print runs were too small for newspapers to be viable without government support. One of the first Arabic newspapers, al-Jawa’ib, was published privately in Istanbul starting in 1861, until it ran into financial difficulties several months later. Sultan Abdul Aziz took the fledgling paper under his wing. “It has been decreed,” the publisher informed his readers, “that the expenses of al-Jawa’ib from now on be covered by the [Ottoman] Ministry of Finance and that it be printed at the imperial press. Under these circumstances, we must pledge loyalty to our master, the great Sultan.”³⁰ These constraints on press freedoms notwithstanding, al-Jawa’ib was remarkably influential, reaching an Arabic-reading audience from Morocco to East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Other papers were soon to follow. Beirut and Cairo emerged as the two main centers for journalism and publishing in the Arab world, and they remain so today. Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century was in the midst of a major literary revival, known in Arabic as the nahda, or “renaissance.” Muslim and Christian intellectuals, encouraged by the power of the (often missionary-owned) printing press, were actively engaged in writing dictionaries and encyclopedias and publishing editions of the great classics of Arabic literature and thought. The nahda was an exciting moment of intellectual rediscovery and of cultural definition, as the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire began to relate to the glories of their pre-Ottoman past. The movement embraced all Arabic-speaking peoples without distinction by sect or region and planted the seed of an idea that would prove hugely influential in Arab politics: that the Arabs were a nation, defined by a common language, culture, and history. In the aftermath of the violent conflicts of 1860 in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, this positive new vision was particularly important in healing deep communal divides. Newspapers played a key role in diffusing these ideas. One of the leading luminaries of the nahda, Butrus al-Bustani, declared in 1859 that newspapers were “among the most important vehicles in educating the public.”³¹ By the end of the 1870s, Beirut boasted no fewer than twenty-five newspapers and current affairs periodicals. By the end of the 1870s, however, the Ottoman government had begun to exert new controls on the press, which developed into strict censorship during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). Many journalists and intellectuals moved from Syria and Lebanon to Egypt, where the khedive exercised far fewer constraints on the press. This migration marked the beginnings of the private press in Cairo and Alexandria. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, over 160 Arabic-language newspapers and journals were established in Egypt.³² One of the most famous papers in the Arab world today, Al-Ahram (literally, “the pyramids”), was founded by two brothers, Salim and Bishara Taqla, who moved from Beirut to Alexandria in the early 1870s. Unlike many of the contemporary papers that provided essays on cultural and scientific subjects, Al-Ahram was, from its first issue of August 5, 1876, a true news paper. The Taqlas took advantage of Alexandria’s telegraph office to subscribe to the Reuters news wire service. Whereas the Beirut press, which had no access to the telegraph and was still reliant on the post, ran foreign stories months after the fact, Al-Ahram provided news from home and abroad within days, even hours, of the event. As the Egyptian press grew more influential, the khedives sought to expand state control over the burgeoning media. The Egyptian government closed down those papers whose political views were deemed “excessive.” Following the Egyptian bankruptcy in 1876 and the ensuing European encroachment into Egypt’s political affairs, journalists were active in the coalition of reformers who threw their support behind Colonel Ahmad Urabi. The government responded by imposing a strict press law in 1881, setting a dangerous precedent of constraints on press freedoms. The press restrictions were eased under British occupation, and by the mid-1890s, Lord Cromer no longer invoked the press law of 1881 at all. He continued to provide subventions for those newspapers most sympathetic to the British in Egypt—the English-language Egyptian Gazette and the Arabic Al-Muqattam—but took no action against papers that were openly critical of his administration. Cromer recognized that newspapers circulated among a very small circle of the literate elite, and that a free press was a useful pressure valve to allow the emerging nationalist movement to vent steam. This was the world of newspaper publishing that Ahmad Amin encountered in the early 1900s: an Arab media that emerged from European technology to express the widest range of views, from pietism to nationalism and anti-imperialism.

The nationalism expressed in the newspapers of Ahmad Amin’s day was a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of “the Nation” as a political unit—a community based in a specific territory with the aspiration of self-governance—was the product of European Enlightenment thought that took root in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, in the course of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, many in the Arab world had frowned on nationalism when it was associated with Christian communities in the Balkans seeking to secede from the Ottoman Empire, usually with European support. Egyptian and North African soldiers had answered the sultan’s call and fought in wars against Balkan nationalist movements from the 1820s through the 1870s. However, once North Africa was removed from the Ottoman world, with the advent of European colonial rule, nationalism emerged as an alternative to foreign domination. Indeed, imperialism provided two important ingredients for nationalism to emerge in North Africa: frontiers that defined the national territory to be liberated, and a common enemy against which to unify the population in a common liberation struggle. Mere resistance to foreign occupation does not constitute nationalism—for want of a clear ideological grounding, neither Abd al-Qadir’s war in Algeria nor Urabi’s revolt in Egypt can be considered nationalist movements. Without a background nationalist ideology, once the armies had been defeated and the leaders were exiled, there was no political movement to sustain the drive for independence from foreign rule. It was only after the Europeans had occupied North Africa that the process of national self-definition began there in earnest. What did it mean to be an “Egyptian,” a “Libyan,” a “Tunisian,” “Algerian,” or “Moroccan”? These national labels did not correspond to any meaningful identity for most people in the Arab world. If asked who they were or where they were from, people either would claim a very local identity—a town (“an Alexandrian”), tribe, at most a region (“the Kabyle Mountains”)—or else see themselves as part of a much larger community, such as the Muslim umma, or “community.” Only Egypt witnessed significant nationalist agitation in the years before the First World War. Reformist Muslim clerics, grappling with paradox of Muslims coming under European Christian rule, began to frame an Islamic response to imperialism. At the same time, a different group of reformers, influenced by the Islamic modernists, set out a secular nationalist agenda. Both the Islamic modernists and the secular nationalists influenced Arab thought and inspired later nationalist movements across the Muslim world.

Two men shaped the debate on Islam and modernity at the end of the nineteenth century: al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), and Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). The two men were partners in an Islamic reform agenda that would shape Islam and nationalism well into the twentieth century. Al-Afghani was a restless thinker who traveled widely across the Islamic world and Europe, inspiring followers and alarming rulers wherever he went. He spent eight years in Egypt, 1871 to 1879, where he taught at the influential mosque university of al-Azhar. Al-Afghani was a religious scholar by training but a political agitator by inclination. His travels through India, Afghanistan, and Istanbul had impressed on him the magnitude of the threat Europe posed to the Islamic world, and the impotence of the heads of Muslim states in addressing the threat. The central focus of al-Afghani’s political philosophy was not that of how to make Muslim countries politically strong and successful, as was the case with Tanzimat reformers in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Ottoman Empire. Rather, he argued that if modern Muslims lived according to the principles of their religion, their countries would regain their former strength and overcome external threats from Europe.³³ Although al-Afghani was convinced that Islam was fully compatible with the modern world, he believed that Muslims needed to update their religion to face the issues of the day. Like all observant Muslims, al-Afghani believed the message of the Qur’an was eternal and equally valid for all times. The part that had grown outdated was the interpretation of the Qur’an, a science that had been deliberately frozen by Islamic scholars in the eleventh century to prevent dissent and schism. Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century were taught theology by the same books as scholars of the twelfth century. Clearly a new interpretation of the Qur’an was called for, to bring Islamic strictures up to date and address the challenges of the nineteenth century—challenges that medieval theologians could never have foreseen. Al-Afghani hoped to constrain Muslim rulers with constitutions based on updated Islamic principles that would put clear limits on their powers, and to stimulate pan-Islamic unity of action among the global community of Muslims. These radical new ideas enflamed a talented generation of young scholars at al-Azhar, including nationalists Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Saad Zaghlul, and the great Islamic modernist, Shaykh Muhammad Abduh. Born in a village of the Nile Delta, Abduh proved one of the greatest thinkers of his age. Islamic scholar, journalist, and judge, he ended his career as the grand mufti of Egypt, the country’s highest religious functionary. He wrote for the famous Al-Ahram newspaper, and like al-Tahtawi he served as editor of the Egyptian government’s official gazette. He was one of Ahmad Urabi’s supporters in 1882 and was exiled by the British to Beirut for his pains. While in exile, Abduh traveled to Western Europe and met up with al-Afghani in Paris, where they launched a reformist journal that called for an Islamic response to Western imperialism. Abduh built on Afghani’s principles to pronounce a more rigorous course of action upon his return to Egypt later in the 1880s. Abduh’s call for a more progressive Islam, paradoxically, took the first community of Muslims—the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, known in Arabic as the salaf, or forefathers—as a role model. Abduh was thus one of the founders of a new line of reformist thought that came to be called Salafism, a term now associated with Osama bin Ladin and the most radical wing of Muslim anti-Western activism. It was not so in Abduh’s time. By invoking the forefathers of Islam, Abduh was hearkening back to a golden age when Muslims observed their religion “correctly” and, as a consequence, emerged as the dominant world power. This period of Muslim dominance throughout the Mediterranean and extending deep into South Asia, lasted for the first four centuries of Islam. Thereafter, he argued, Islamic thought ossified. Mysticism crept in, rationalism waned, and the community fell into a blind observance of the law. Only by stripping Islam of these accretions could the umma return to the pure and rational practices of the forefathers and recover the dynamism that once made Islam the dominant world civilization. As a student at al-Azhar, Ahmad Amin had to overcome his diffidence to attend classes given by the great Muhammad Abduh. His recollections of Abduh’s teaching give a vivid sense of the Islamic reformers impact on his students. “I attended two lessons, heard his beautiful voice, saw his venerable appearance, and understood from him what I had not understood from my Azharite shaykhs.” Muhammad Abduh’s reformist agenda was never far from his teaching. “From time to time,” Amin recalled, Abduh “digressed to discuss the conditions of Muslims, their crookedness, and the way to cure them.”³⁴ Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh made Islam an integral part of national identity as Egypt moved into the age of nationalism. In their concern for the state of Muslim society, Abduh and his followers began to debate social reforms along with the national struggle.

In their debates on “the conditions of Muslims,” Muhammad Abduh’s followers began to argue for changes in the position of women in Muslim society. Since their first encounter with Europeans at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Egyptian intellectuals had been confronted by a very different model of gender relations—and disapproved of what they saw. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti was appalled by the impact Napoleon’s men had on Egyptian women. “French local administrators, together with their Muslim wives dressed like French women, would walk in the streets, take interest in public affairs and current regulations,” he noted disapprovingly. “Women commanded and forbade.”³⁵ This was nothing short of an inversion of the natural order, as al-Jabarti understood it, of a world in which men commanded and forbade. Al-Tahtawi, observing relations between the sexes in Paris thirty years later, also complained about this inversion of the “natural order.” “The men are slaves to the women here and under their command,” he wrote, “irrespective of whether they are pretty or not.”³⁶ Al-Jabarti and al-Tahtawi came from a society where respectable women were confined to separate quarters at home and glided anonymously through public places under layers of clothes and veils. This was still the case in the Cairo of Ahmad Amin’s childhood. Amin described his mother and sisters as “veiled, never seeing people or being seen by them except from behind veils.”³⁷ In the 1890s Egyptian reformers were beginning to articulate a different role for women, none more forcefully than the lawyer Qasim Amin (1863–1908), who argued that the foundation of the national struggle for independence had to begin with improving the position of women in society. Qasim Amin (no relation to Ahmad Amin) was born into privilege. His Turkish father had served as an Ottoman governor and attained the rank of pasha before moving to Egypt. Qasim was sent to the best private schools in Egypt and went on to study law in Cairo and Montpelier. He returned to Egypt in 1885 and was soon caught up in the reformist circles around Muhammad Abduh. While his colleagues debated the role of Islam and of the British occupation in Egypt’s national revival, Qasim Amin focused on the status of women. In 1899 he wrote his pioneering work, The Liberation of Women. Writing as a Muslim reformer to a Muslim audience, Qasim Amin connected his arguments to a secular nationalist agenda of liberation from imperialism. Denied access to education, let alone to the workplace, only 1 percent of women could read and write in Egypt in 1900.³⁸ As Qasim Amin argued then, and as the authors of the Arab Human Development Report still argue today, the failure to empower women disempowers the Arab world as a whole. In Qasim Amin’s words, “Women comprise at least half the total population of the world. Perpetuating their ignorance denies a country the benefits of the abilities of half its population, with obvious negative consequences.”³⁹ His critique, written in classical Arabic, was biting:Throughout the generations our women have continued to be subordinate to the rule of the strong and are overcome by the powerful tyranny of men. On the other hand, men have not wished to consider women other than as beings fit only to serve men and be led by men’s will! Men have slammed shut the doors of opportunity in women’s faces, thus hindering them from earning a living. As a consequence, the only recourse left to a woman was to be a wife or a whore.⁴⁰

Qasim Amin drew a contrast between the progress of women’s rights in Europe and America and the contribution of women to civilization in the West, and the relative underdevelopment of Egypt and the Muslim world. “The inferior position of Muslim women is the greatest obstacle that prevents us from advancing toward what is beneficial to us,” he argued.⁴¹ He then connected the position of women to the national struggle. “In order to improve the condition of the nation, it is imperative we improve the condition of women.”⁴² The Liberation of Women provoked intense debate among reformers, conservatives, nationalists, and intellectuals. Conservatives and nationalists condemned Amin’s work as subversive to the fabric of society while religious scholars accused him of subverting God’s order. Qasim Amin responded to his critic with a sequel published the following year under the title The New Woman, in which he abandoned religious rhetoric and argued for women’s rights in terms of evolution, natural rights, and progress. Qasim Amin’s work does not live up to the expectations of modern feminist thought. This was an argument among men, debating the benefits they should confer on women. In his call to improve education and the general position of women in Egyptian society, Amin fell short of demanding full equality between the sexes. Yet for his time and place, Qasim Amin pushed the agenda of women?s rights farther than had ever been done before. The debates provoked by his work set change in motion. Within twenty years, the initiative would be taken up by elite women in Egypt, who entered the nationalist movement and began to demand their own rights.

Under the impact of the great debates of the day—on national identity, Islamic reform, and social issues like gender equality, a distinct Egyptian nationalism began to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. Two men proved most influential in shaping early Egyptian nationalism: Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Mustafa Kamil. Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) was the son of a rural notable who attended a modern secondary school and, in 1889, entered law school. Though he is acknowledged as one of the disciples of Muhammad Abduh, Lutfi al-Sayyid did not privilege Islam as the basis of national regeneration. Rather, Egypt as a nation was the focus of Lutfi al-Sayyid’s political vision. In this sense, he was one of the very first nation-state nationalists in the Arab world. He differed with those who gave their primary allegiance to the Arabs, or the Ottomans, or to pan-Islamic ideals. As a founding member of the People’s Party, established by the circle of Muhammad Abduh, and through his writings in the newspaper he edited, al-Jarida, he promoted the ideal of an Egyptian nation with a natural right to self-rule. Lutfi al-Sayyid objected to the British and the khedives as two forms of autocracy denying the Egyptian people legitimate government. Yet he recognized the benefits of sound administration and financial regularity that came with British rule. He also believed that, under the circumstances, it was unrealistic to hope for independence from Britain. The British had vested interests in Egypt and the military strength to uphold them. Rather, Lutfi al-Sayyid argued, the Egyptian people should use the British to change the Egyptian government by imposing a constitution on the khedive and to build up the institutions of indigenous rule—both the Legislative Council and the Provincial Councils. Ahmad Amin was a regular at Lutfi al-Sayyid’s office at the Jarida newspaper, where Egyptian nationalists would gather to debate the issues of the day. Here Ahmad Amin received his social and political education, “thanks to the lectures of our Professor Lutfi [al-Sayyid] and others, and my contact with a select group of the best intellectuals.”⁴³ Lutfi al-Sayyid represented the moderate wing of the nationalist movement in Egypt, a man who was willing to work with the imperialists to bring Egypt up to a standard where it could achieve independence. There was, however, a more radical version of Egyptian nationalism, and its champion was Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908). Like Lutfi al-Sayyid, he received a modern education in law, in Cairo and in France. He was a founding member of the National Party. While in France, Kamil connected with a number of French nationalist thinkers, who were every bit as hostile toward British imperialism as was the young Egyptian. Kamil returned to his homeland in the mid-1890s to agitate for the end of the British occupation. In 1900 he founded a newspaper, al-Liwa’ (“the banner”), which proved an influential voice piece for the nascent nationalist movement. Kamil was a brilliant orator and a charismatic young man. He provided the national movement with broad support among students and the street. For a while, he also enjoyed the clandestine support of the khedive Abbas II Hilmi (r. 1892–1914), who hoped to exploit the nationalist movement to put pressure on the British. Yet the young religious scholar Ahmad Amin was not at first won over by Kamil’s radical nationalism, which he dismissed as emotional rather than rational.⁴⁴ In a sense, the great challenge facing nationalists in Egypt at the start of the twentieth century was that the British had done so little to provoke the Egyptian people to revolt against them. Though the people of Egypt resented the idea of foreign rule, the British brought regular government, stability, and low taxes. Few Egyptians ever came into contact with their British occupiers, who were a remote and self-contained people little given to mixing with the common people of Egypt. Thus, while the Egyptians did not like being under British rule, the British had done nothing to provoke them out of a complacent acceptance of colonial rule. Until the Dinshaway Incident.