Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

In hindsight, it is easy to see that the American-led King-Crane Commission was a fool’s mission. The British and French declined to nominate officials to take part in the study, thereby undermining the validity of what had become an American, rather than a multinational, delegation. As they had no intention of being bound by the commission’s findings, they did not wish to commit their own diplomats to the process. And yet the King-Crane Report is a unique document, providing in the words of its authors “a fairly accurate analysis of present political opinion in Syria”—a glimpse into the aspirations and fears of rural and urban communities in that brief moment between Ottoman and European rule.¹⁴ In March 1919, President Wilson named Oberlin College president Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman Charles R. Crane to head the commission. Both men had extensive knowledge of the Middle East—King as a scholar of biblical history and Crane through his travels in Ottoman lands, dating back to 1878. The Americans set out for Syria in May 1919 with instructions to meet with local representatives and report back on the aspirations of the Arab peoples in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The King-Crane Commission proved to be much more than just a fact-finding mission. The two men’s presence in Greater Syria set in motion intense nationalist activity involving a broader swath of the Syrian population than any political movement up to that point. When Amir Faysal returned to Syria from Paris empty-handed, he presented the imminent arrival of the King-Crane Commission to his followers as a favorable development and a serious step toward achieving Syrian national aspirations. He gave a speech to an assembly of notables from across Greater Syria to brief them on his experiences. He could not tell them the whole truth, of how he had been kept waiting and was humiliated by the peacemakers in Paris, who seemed intent on rejecting his claims to uphold their own imperial interests in Greater Syria. Now that he was back on Arab territory, speaking his own language to his own supporters, he turned the condescension back on the Europeans. “I went . . . to claim our due at the Conference which was meeting in Paris,” he explained. “I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the Arabian Nights.” In many regards, Faysal was right. Aside from a handful of experts, the average politician in Britain and France would have known very little about the Arab world. ?Naturally this ignorance of theirs made me spend a good deal of time in simply giving basic facts,? Faysal explained. Looking out over the faces of his supporters, who frequently interrupted his speech to pledge their devotion, he could not admit to failure. However, he stretched the truth beyond recognition when he asserted that the Allies had recognized the independence of the Arab people in principle. He tried to present the King-Crane Commission as an extension of great power recognition of Arab aspirations. “The international committee,” he said, “will ask you to express yourselves in any way you please, for the nations today do not want to govern other peoples except with their consent.”¹⁵ Buoyed by Faysal’s words, Syrian nationalists set to work to unite the people of Syria behind a common agenda. The Arab government distributed sermons to be read in Friday prayers in Syrian mosques, political and cultural associations were enlisted to prepare petitions for the King-Crane Commission, and the headmen of villages and town quarters were mobilized to encourage an enthusiastic response to the commission. Thousands of leaflets were printed and distributed in towns and villages. For people new to nationalist politics, the leaflets provided straightforward ideas in the form of slogans. “We demand absolute independence,” asserted one leaflet in bold Arabic and English. Another leaflet exhorted all Syrians to defend their freedom and used parentheses to set out nationalist slogans within the longer text. Let no one mislead you into betraying the land of your grandfathers, or your children and grandchildren will curse you. Live free! Liberate yourself from the yoke of oppression. Seek your own benefit and make your demands the following: First: Demand (Complete Political Independence) without restriction or condition or protection or trusteeship. Second: Accept no partition of your people’s land and your fatherland, in other words (Syria in its entirety is one and indivisible). Third: Demand your country’s borders, the Taurus Mountains in the north, the Sinai Desert in the south, the Mediterranean to the West. Fourth: Seek for the other liberated Arab lands independence and union [with Syria]. Fifth: When necessary, show preference in financial or technical insistence to America on condition that it not compromise our complete political independence. Sixth: Protest Article 22 of the League of Nations setting out the necessity of trusteeship over people seeking independence. Seventh: Refuse absolutely any claim made by any state to historic or preponderant rights in our lands. (signed) An informed Arab nationalist¹⁶

Even in the Arabic original the language is awkward, but the message was unambiguous. As local communities prepared to meet with the King-Crane Commission, these demands were frequently repeated in the petitions they submitted and in the slogans chanted and painted on signs and banners. Having mobilized Syrian public opinion, Faysal and his advisors convened a makeshift parliament to present the Syrian people’s views to the international commission. The Hashemites knew enough about European statecraft to recognize that according to their rules, a nation expressed its legitimate aspirations through an elected assembly. They relied on Ottoman electoral procedures to select delegates from the inland towns of Syria. They had to resort to other methods in Lebanon and Palestine, where the British and French occupation authorities obstructed all political action.¹⁷ Leading members of notable families and tribes in Palestine and Lebanon were invited to Damascus to join the Syrian General Congress. Nearly one hundred delegates had been selected to take part in the Congress, though only sixty-nine actually managed to reach Damascus in time to participate in its deliberations. They were working against the clock to produce a statement of national aspirations before the King-Crane Commission reached Damascus.

The King-Crane Commission arrived in Jaffa on June 10, 1919, and spent six weeks touring towns and villages in Palestine, Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon. The commissioners kept statistics on all aspects of their trip. They held meetings in more than forty towns and rural centers and met with 442 delegations, representing people from all walks of life, such as municipal and administrative councils, village chiefs, and tribal shaykhs. They received farmers and tradesmen, and representatives of over a dozen Christian denominations, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Jews, Druze, and other minority groups. They met with eight different women’s delegations and marveled at “the new role women are playing in the nationalistic movements in the Orient.” In the course of their travels they collected 1,863 petitions, with a total of 91,079 signatures—representing nearly 3 percent of the total population of Greater Syria (which they estimated at 3.2 million). The commissioners could not have been more thorough in sounding out public opinion in Greater Syria. King and Crane reached Damascus on June 25. Yusif al-Hakim, a minister in Amir Faysal’s government, recalled:They paid an official visit to the Royal Palace and to the head of the government. They then returned to their hotel, where the first people to greet them were the men of the press. In brief, they told the journalists that they had merely come to assess the will of the people in their political future, and to learn which state they would choose to serve as a mandatory over them for a period to provide technical and economic assistance, in accordance with previous statements of President Wilson.¹⁸

On July 2 the Syrian Congress presented the commission with a ten-point resolution that, they maintained, represented both the views of the Syrian people and the government of Amir Faysal.¹⁹ The resolution revealed a surprising degree of knowledge on the part of the drafters about international affairs; the text was replete with quotes from President Wilson and the Covenant of the League of Nations as well as references to the conflicting promises of Britain’s wartime diplomacy and the aims of Zionism. King and Crane claimed the resolution was the most important document of their mission. In their resolution, the delegates of the Syrian Congress demanded complete political independence for Syria within geographic boundaries separating it from Turkey, Iraq, Najd, Hijaz, and Egypt. They wanted their country to be ruled as a constitutional monarchy, with Amir Faysal as their king. They rejected the mandate principle set out in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations outright, arguing that the Arabs were no less gifted than the Bulgarians, Serbians, Greeks, and Romanians, all of whom had secured full independence from the Ottomans without such European tutelage. The Syrian delegates expressed their full willingness to come under a mandate that was restricted to providing technical and economic assistance. They most trusted the Americans to fulfill this role, “believing that the American Nation is farthest from any thought of colonization and has no political ambition in our country.” Should America refuse to serve, the Syrian people would accept a British mandate, but they rejected any role for France whatsoever. The resolution also called for the independence of Iraq, then under British occupation. The Syrian Congress took a strong stand against the secret wartime diplomacy. In a swipe against both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, its members wrote: “The fundamental principles laid down by President Wilson in condemnation of secret treaties impel us to protest most emphatically against any treaty that stipulates the partition of our Syrian country and against any private engagement aiming at the establishment of Zionism in the southern part of Syria; therefore we ask the complete annulment of these conventions and agreements.” They ruled out any separation of Lebanon or Palestine from the Syrian kingdom, and went on to reject the aims of Zionism as inimical to their national interests. “We oppose the pretensions of the Zionists to create a Jewish commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economical, and political points of view.” There was a tone of moral indignation to the Resolution of the Syrian Congress. Many in the provisional Syrian government had fought with Amir Faysal in the Arab Revolt. They believed they were wartime allies of Britain and France, and had contributed significantly to the victory on the Ottoman front. Faysal and his Arab Army had entered Damascus on October 2, 1918, and liberated the city from Ottoman rule. The people of Syria, they believed, were now entitled to determine their own political future by rights earned on the battlefield. The Syrian General Congress expected basic justice from its wartime allies, ?in order that our political rights may not be less after the war than they were before, since we have shed so much blood in the cause of our liberty and independence.? In August 1919, after six weeks in Syria, King and Crane withdrew to Istanbul to draft their report. The commissioners subjected all of the materials they had gathered to extensive analysis. In their recommendations to the Peace Conference, King and Crane largely endorsed the Syrian Congress’s resolution. They called for a single Syrian state, undivided, with Amir Faysal as head of a constitutional monarchy. They recommended that Syria as a whole be placed under a single mandatory power, preferably American (though with Britain as second choice), for a limited period, to provide support. And they urged major modifications to the Zionist project, with limits on Jewish immigration. King and Crane argued that the Balfour Declaration’s promises, both to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine and to respect “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” could not be reconciled. “The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives,” the King-Crane report noted, “that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.”²⁰ Not surprisingly, the commissioners found that nine-tenths of the non-Jewish population of Palestine were “emphatically against the entire Zionist program” and that 72 percent of the petitions they received in Greater Syria were directed against Zionism. The commission submitted its report to the American delegation in Paris at the end of August 1919. Though Amir Faysal was not privy to the report, he could not have asked for more. For the Europeans, however, the King-Crane report was a very inconvenient document. The report was received by the Peace Conference secretariat and shelved without further consultation. It was only made public three years later, by which time Britain and France had concluded a division of the Arab world that they believed at the time better served their interests.

Britain declared its intention to withdraw its troops from Syria and Lebanon on November 1, 1919, with the transfer of authority to the French military to follow. The Syrian General Congress, faced with an imminent French occupation, decided to take matters into its own hands. Its members prepared a declaration of independence, based on the resolution delivered to the King-Crane Commission, which was read from the town hall of Damascus on March 8, 1920. Faysal was declared king of Syria, including Palestine and Lebanon. The British and French governments refused to recognize the Syrian declaration of independence. The British looked the other way as the French prepared to occupy Damascus and unseat their wartime ally, Amir?now King?Faysal. Increasingly isolated at home for his failure to deliver on his promises of independence, Faysal could only rally a small band of supporters to confront the French army as it advanced from Lebanon toward Syria. The Damascenes did not believe Faysal?s cause worth dying for. At dawn on July 24, 1920, a group of 2,000 Arab volunteers assembled at an isolated caravansary named Khan Maysalun, in a mountain pass on the road from Beirut to Damascus. They faced a bizarre column of colonial soldiers in French uniforms: Algerians, Moroccans, and Senegalese troops under French commanders sent to secure French rule in Syria. It was a reflection of the power of the French Empire that Arab Muslim soldiers from its North African colonies were willing to serve their colonial masters against Arab Muslim irregulars in Syria. One of the members of the provisional Syrian government, and a committed Arab Nationalist, Sati al-Husri, recorded his memories of the “day of Maysalun” as he followed events from Damascus:Details of the battle began to trickle back. Although I couldn’t entertain any hopes of victory in view of what I knew about our army and the equipment of the French, I kept wishing that the outcome would remain in doubt as long as possible for the sake of our military honour. By 10 o’clock, however, we received word that the army had been defeated and the front shattered. Yusuf al-Azmah [the Minister of War and commander of the armed forces] was reported to have been killed. I said no—he committed suicide at Maysalun, a true martyr!²¹

French forces swept past the defenders at Maysalun to enter Damascus, marking the start of an unhappy colonial occupation that would last twenty-six years. Yet the symbolic significance of Maysalun spread far beyond the frontiers of Syria. To the Arabs, this small battle represented the betrayal of Britain’s wartime promises, the bankruptcy of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s vision of national self-determination, and the triumph of British and French colonial self-interest over the hopes and aspirations of millions of Arabs. Maysalun was equated with original sin, when the Europeans imposed their state system on the Middle East, dividing a people who aspired to unity and placing them under foreign rule against their will. The new Arab states and boundaries of the postwar settlement proved remarkably enduring. So too did the problems they engendered.

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.