Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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The exiled King Husayn of the Hijaz was within his rights to feel betrayed by the British. Not only had Britain failed to fulfill Sir Henry McMahon’s written commitments to the Hashemites, but the British had stood by and watched as the French drove his son King Faysal from Syria in 1920, and the Saudis drove his eldest son King Ali from the Hijaz in 1925. The British, for their part, were not entirely satisfied they had discharged their commitments to their wartime ally, and they looked for a way to redeem their promises in part, if not in full. As the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, explained to the House of Commons in June 1921, “We are leaning strongly to what I may call the Sherifian Solution both in Mesopotamia to which the Emir Feisal [Amir Faysal] is now proceeding, and in Trans-Jordania, where the Emir Abdullah is now in charge.”¹⁶ Churchill hoped that by putting Husayn’s sons on British mandate thrones he would go some way toward redeeming Britain’s broken promises to the Hashemites while providing Britain with loyal and dependent rulers in their Arab possessions.

Of all the British imperial possessions in the Middle East, Transjordan would prove the easiest to rule. However, the new state of Transjordan got off to a difficult start. With a land mass the size of Indiana or Hungary, Transjordan had a population of only 350,000, divided between the townspeople and villagers living in the high plateau overlooking the Jordan Valley and the nomadic tribesmen who made their home between the desert and the steppe. Its subsistence economy was based on agricultural and pastoral products that provided a modest tax base for a very small state. The politics of Transjordan were also fairly basic. The country was divided into distinct regions, each with its own local leadership whose view of politics was very local. A small British subsidy—Ј150,000 per annum—went a long way in such a place. The British did not initially conceive of Transjordan as a separate state in its own right. The territory initially was awarded to Great Britain as part of the Palestine mandate. The decision to sever Transjordan from Palestine, formalized in 1923, was driven by two considerations: Britain’s wish to confine the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home to the lands west of the Jordan River; and Britain’s wish to confine Amir Abdullah’s ambitions to territory under British control. Amir Abdullah first entered Transjordan uninvited, in November 1920. He was surrounded by a group of Arab nationalists, political refugees from his brother Faysal?s defunct Arab Kingdom in Damascus. Abdullah announced he would lead Arab volunteers to liberate Syria from French rule and to restore his brother Faysal to his rightful throne in Damascus (Abdullah himself aspired to the throne of Iraq). The last thing the British government needed was for Transjordan to become a launching pad for hostilities against the neighboring French mandate of Syria. British officials scrambled to deal with the situation before things got out of hand. Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence invited Amir Abdullah to a meeting in Jerusalem in March 1921, at which point they updated him on Britain’s plans for its empire in the Middle East. Faysal would never return to Damascus, which was securely in French hands; instead, he was to be king of Iraq. The best they could offer Abdullah was to place him at the head of the new state of Transjordan. Landlocked Transjordan (the territory did not yet include the Red Sea port of Aqaba) fell well short of Abdullah’s ambitions, but Churchill suggested that if Abdullah kept the peace in Transjordan and established good relations with the French, they might one day invite him to rule over Damascus for them.¹⁷ It was a long shot, but Abdullah agreed to these proposals, and the Sharifian Solution became British imperial reality in Transjordan. When Amir Abdullah established his first government in Transjordan in 1921, he drew heavily on the Arab nationalists who had served with his brother Faysal in Damascus. The British and the people of Transjordan had a common dislike of Abdullah’s entourage. The British saw them as firebrands and troublemakers whose attacks against the French in Syria were a constant irritant. For the Transjordanians, the Arab nationalists, who came to form a new party called the Istiqlal, or “Independence,” represented a foreign elite who dominated the government and bureaucracy to the exclusion of the indigenous people of the land. One of the most outspoken opponents of the Istiqlalis in Transjordan was a local judge named Awda al-Qusus (1877–1943). Qusus was a Christian from the southern town of Karak who had served in the Ottoman court system before the First World War. Fluent in Turkish, with a spattering of English learned from Methodist missionaries, al-Qusus had traveled widely throughout the Ottoman Empire and had worked with high government officials. He firmly believed that Amir Abdullah should form his government from Transjordanians like himself, who had a real interest in the welfare of their new country. His greatest objection to the Istiqlalis was that they were only concerned with liberating Damascus. The first article of their party’s constitution, Al-Qusus wryly remarked, was “to sacrifice Transjordan and its people on the road to Syria’s betterment.”¹⁸ Certainly his own persecution at the hands of the Istiqlalis would only confirm this view. Al-Qusus openly criticized the Istiqlalis in articles he wrote for the local newspaper. He accused government ministers of corruption and the misappropriation of treasury funds for their own projects, without Abdullah?s knowledge. The native Transjordanians responded to the judge?s criticisms by refusing to pay taxes to an ?alien? government that was seen to be squandering their country?s limited funds. In June 1921 the villagers of northern Transjordan declared a tax strike that quickly escalated into a serious rebellion. The British had to resort to air strikes by Royal Air Force planes to quell the uprising. The troubles between Amir Abdullah’s government and the natives of Transjordan only worsened after the 1921 tax revolt. Al-Qusus met regularly with a group of professional townsmen to discuss the cronyism and corruption they deplored in the amir’s government. These Transjordanian dissidents compared notes on government maladministration and openly discussed the need for reform. When Amir Abdullah faced a major tribal uprising in the summer of 1923, the Istiqlalis accused al-Qusus and the dissident townsmen of provoking the revolt, and they urged Abdullah to crack down on their domestic opponents. That very night, September 6, 1923, the police pounded on Justice Awda al-Qusus’s door and took him away. Al-Qusus would not return home for seven months. Stripped of his official rank by order of the amir, he was exiled to the neighboring Kingdom of the Hijaz (which was still under Hashemite rule). He was joined by four other natives of Transjordan: an army officer, a Circassian, a Muslim cleric, and a rural notable who would later be celebrated as the national poet of Jordan, Mustafa Wahbi al-Tall. The five were accused of creating a “secret society” that sought to overturn the amir’s government and replace it with natives of Transjordan. They were falsely accused of being in league with the head of the Adwan tribe and encouraging the tribal revolt to facilitate their coup. The charge was high treason, and the severity of the charge was reflected in the harshness of the treatment meted out to al-Qusus and his fellows. As they arrived at the railway station in Amman to take the train into exile, the five were in a defiant mood. Mustafa Wahbi, the poet, was singing nationalist songs and stirring the men’s defiance. “Before God and history, Awda!” he shouted. The men had no sense of the ordeal that lay before them. When they arrived in Maan, now a city in Jordan but then a town on the frontier of the Hijaz, they were taken to a dank and fetid cell in the basement of the old castle. Al-Qusus grabbed his guard and screamed: “Have you no fear of God? A place like this is not suitable for animals, let alone for people.” The guards and their commanders, who knew their prisoners were respectable men, were embarrassed. Everything about their culture and society dictated that they should show hospitality to men entrusted to their care. Yet they were military men who had to obey orders. Their behavior toward their prisoners alternated radically between great kindness—finding clean bedding, providing tea and company—and great cruelty, torturing the detainees to secure their signed confessions to the charges leveled against them by the government. The officials who ordered the torture and dictated the confessions were of course men from Amir Abdullah?s foreign retinue. Al-Qusus and his companions were then formally indicted in absentia of ?plotting against the government of His Highness the Amir with intent to overthrow the government by armed insurrection.?¹⁹ They were then sent to prison in the Hijaz, first in Aqaba and then in Jidda. The exiles were allowed to return to their homeland as part of a general amnesty issued on the occasion of King Husayn’s assumption of the caliphate in March 1924. The new Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had just abolished the institution of the caliphate as a final measure to eradicate the influence of the Ottoman sultanate, and King Husayn, now in exile from the Hijaz, was quick to seize the honor for the Hashemite family. As was customary on high state occasions, prisoners were released as part of the celebrations. Their prison ordeal now at an end, the five men were given first-class berths on a steamship from Jidda to the Egyptian port of Suez, whence they made their way to Transjordan. Al-Qusus sent a telegram of thanks to King Husayn and congratulated him on his (ultimately unsuccessful) assumption of the caliphate. He received a quick reply from the exiled monarch, wishing al-Qusus a safe and speedy return to his homeland, “which is in need of people like you with patriotism and friendship towards the fatherland and true adherence to the great Hashemite household.” Was the old king being ironic, or was he admonishing the political prisoners to mend their ways and prove more loyal in future? The truth of the matter was that al-Qusus had never shown disloyalty to Amir Abdullah; he had only objected to the Istiqlalis the amir put into positions of authority over native Transjordanians. Though he did not know it, the British colonial authorities fully shared Awda al-Qusus’s concerns. The British resident in Amman, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cox, invited al-Qusus to visit him shortly after his return from exile in the Hijaz. He asked the judge to explain the reasons for his imprisonment, and to share his views on Amir Abdullah’s government. Cox took careful notes on their discussion, thanked al-Qusus, and saw him out. In August 1924, Cox delivered an ultimatum from the acting high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Gilbert Clayton, to Amir Abdullah. In his letter, Clayton warned Abdullah that the British government viewed his administration “with grave displeasure” for its “financial irregularities and unchecked extravagance” and for allowing Transjordan to become a focus of disorder to neighboring Syria. Abdullah was asked to commit in writing to six conditions to reform his administration, chief among them the expulsion of leading Istiqlalis within five days’ time.²⁰ Abdullah dared not refuse. The British had sent 400 cavalrymen to Amman and 300 troops to the northern town of Irbid to back up their ultimatum. Fearing the British would depose him as quickly as they had installed him, Amir Abdullah signed the ultimatum. After this confrontation Amir Abdullah expelled the Istiqlali “undesirables,” reformed the finances of his government, and drew natives of Transjordan into his administration. Awda al-Qusus returned to service in the Jordanian judiciary, rising to the office of attorney general in 1931. Once he had thrown in his lot with the elites of Transjordan, Amir Abdullah enjoyed the support and loyalty of his people. Transjordan went on to be a model colony of peace and stability, at very little cost to the British taxpayer until its independence in 1946.

Although Transjordan proved the easiest to manage of Britain’s Middle East possessions, Iraq was for a time viewed as the most successful mandate. King Faysal was installed in 1921, a Constituent Assembly was elected beginning in 1924, and a treaty regulating relations between Britain and Iraq was ratified later that same year. By 1930 Iraq was a stable constitutional monarchy and Britain’s work as mandatory power was complete. A new treaty was negotiated between Britain and Iraq, paving the way to Iraq’s independence in 1932. The League of Nations recognized Iraq’s independence and admitted the new state to its ranks—the only mandate to become a full member of the league in its twenty-six-year history. Iraq was the envy of all the other Arab states left under British or French rule, and its accomplishments became the goals of nationalists across the Arab world: independence and membership in the League of Nations. As Britain ushered the young kingdom of Iraq into statehood, behind a facade of success lay a very different reality. Many Iraqis had never accepted Britain’s position in their country. Their opposition did not end with the 1920 uprising but continued to plague the British project in Iraq to the end. Though Faysal was in many ways a popular king, his own position was undermined by his reliance on the British. Iraqi nationalists increasingly came to see Faysal as an extension of British influence and to criticize him in the same breath as they condemned their imperial masters.

When Faysal arrived in Iraq in June 1921, the British went to work in promoting their candidate to the Iraqi throne. A number of local contenders threw their hats in the ring but encountered stiff British resistance. An influential notable from Basra who had made a bid for the throne, Sayyid Talib al-Naqib, went for tea with the British high commissioner’s wife, Lady Cox, and found himself arrested and exiled to Ceylon on the way home. The high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his staff organized an exhausting tour for Faysal to visit towns and tribes across Iraq in advance of a national referendum intended to confirm Britain’s choice for Iraq’s throne. By all accounts, Faysal played his part well, traveling around the country meeting Iraq’s diverse communities and winning their allegiance. Even without British tampering, he probably would have won the consent of a majority of Iraqis to be their king. But the British left nothing to chance. Gertrude Bell, the Oriental secretary in Baghdad, famously remarked that she would ?never engage in creating kings again; it?s too great a strain.?²¹ Faysal was crowned king of Iraq on August 23, 1921. The ceremony was held in the early morning hours to take advantage of the coolest time of day in the prodigious heat of the Baghdad summer. Over 1,500 guests were invited to witness the coronation. Sulayman al-Faydi, a notable from Mosul, described the “great splendour” of the coronation, which was “attended by thousands of guests, the roads leading to it crowded with tens of thousands of people.”²² Faysal stood on a dais flanked by the British high commissioner and members of the Iraqi Council of Ministers. The secretary of the council rose to read Sir Percy’s proclamation announcing the results of the referendum. Faysal had been elected king by 96 percent of the Iraqi voters. The assembled guests and dignitaries stood and saluted King Faysal while the Iraqi flag was raised to the strains of “God Save the King”—the Iraqis had yet to compose their own national anthem.²³ The music could only have reinforced the belief that Faysal was Britain’s choice of king—as indeed he was.

Faysal’s honeymoon with his new subjects proved short-lived. Most Iraqis believed Faysal to be an Arab nationalist and expected him to free their country from British rule. They were quickly disappointed. Muhammad Mahdi Kubba, a student in a Shiite theological college in Baghdad at the time of Faysal’s coronation, captured the public’s mood in his memoirs. The British, he explained, “brought Amir Faysal, and crowned him king of Iraq, and charged him with the task of implementing their policies. At first the Iraqis welcomed the installation of Faysal, and they pinned their hopes on him, that his presence at the head of the government would open a new age of independence and national sovereignty.” Indeed, some leading notables gave their allegiance to Faysal on condition that he defend Iraq’s sovereignty and independence. One such skeptic was an influential cleric named Ayatollah Mahdi al-Khalisi, the head of Kubba’s theological school in Baghdad. Kubba witnessed al-Khalisi’s pledge of allegiance before a school assembly convened to welcome King Faysal. “Khalisi said prayers for King Faysal . . . [and] took [him] by the hand saying: ‘We give you our allegiance as King of Iraq, so long as you govern with justice, that the government is constitutional and parliamentary, and that you do not entangle Iraq in any foreign commitments.’”²⁴ King Faysal promised to do his best, saying he had only come to Iraq to serve its people. Faysal knew full well that he would not be able to rule Iraq independent of Britain. As was mandated by the League of Nations, he was condemned to rule under British tutelage until Britain saw fit to concede Iraq its independence. Moreover, he was a stranger in Iraq, with only a handful of army officers who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and the short-lived Kingdom of Syria, for allies. Until he had established his position in Iraq, Faysal would need Britain?s support to survive. The problem for Faysal was that his dependence on Britain cost him the support of Iraqi nationalists. The irony was that it was his dependence on Britain that undermined his ability to develop the loyalty of his own countrymen?right until his death in 1933. Faysal’s predicament became apparent in 1922 when Britain drafted a treaty to regularize its position in Iraq. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty scarcely veiled the degree of British domination over the Hashemite Kingdom—in the economy, diplomacy, and law. “His Majesty the King of Iraq,” the treaty stipulated, “agrees to be guided by the advice of His Britannic Majesty tendered through the High Commissioner on all important matters affecting the international and financial obligations and interests of His Britannic Majesty for the whole period of this Treaty.”²⁵ Most revealing of British intentions was the duration of the treaty—twenty years—after which the situation would be reviewed and the treaty either renewed or terminated, according to the views of the “High Contracting Parties.” This was a formula for extended British colonial rule, not Iraqi independence. The draft treaty faced widespread condemnation in Iraq. Even King Faysal discretely encouraged opposition to the treaty, both because of the limits it imposed on his power as king and to distance himself from British imperial policy. Some ministers resigned in protest. The Council of Ministers, unwilling to bear responsibility for so controversial a document, insisted on convening an elected constituent assembly to ratify the treaty. The British agreed to elections but wanted to ensure that the resulting assembly would endorse their treaty. Nationalist politicians opposed both the treaty and the elections, recognizing that the constituent assembly would serve only to rubber stamp an agreement designed to perpetuate British control. Inevitably, Faysal’s credibility was compromised by the treaty crisis. Ayatollah al-Khalisi addressed another assembly of the students and teachers of his theological school. “We gave our allegiance to Faysal to be king of Iraq on condition,” the ayatollah intoned, “and he failed to fulfill these conditions. Consequently, neither we nor the Iraqi people owe him any allegiance.” Al-Khalisi threw in his lot with the nationalist opposition and began to issue fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) declaring the treaty unlawful and forbidding all participation in the constituent assembly elections as “tantamount to an act against religion, as a step that assisted non-believers to rule over Muslims.”²⁶ The clerics made common cause with secular nationalists and organized a boycott campaign against the upcoming elections. In the end, the British had to impose their treaty by force. The British authorities prohibited all demonstrations. Al-Khalisi and other opposition leaders were arrested and exiled. The Royal Air Force was dispatched to bomb tribal insurgents in the Middle Euphrates region who had risen in protest. With the opposition quelled, the authorities proceeded with the elections. Despite the fatwas and the nationalists? campaigning, the elections did proceed and a constituent assembly was convened in March 1924 to debate and ratify the treaty. The Constituent Assembly met and debated the terms of the treaty in earnest from March to October 1924. In the end, the treaty was ratified by a slim majority. It remained hugely unpopular with the Iraqi public, though it set in motion a number of important developments: the Assembly approved a constitution for the new state and passed an electoral law that lay foundations for both a constitutional monarchy and a multiparty democracy. However, the means used by the British to get the treaty passed tainted the instruments of constitutional and parliamentary government with imperial associations that would ultimately undermine democracy in Iraq. The new state was not seen by Iraqi nationalists as a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but as an institution implicating Iraqis in British rule over their country.

If the British hoped things would go smoothly after the passage of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, they were to be sorely disappointed. Indeed, British and American war planners of 2003 would have found many relevant lessons to be learned from British experiences in the 1920s. Divisions quickly emerged between the different regions and communities of the new Iraqi state, which had been forged from three very different Ottoman provinces. The problem was immediately apparent in the formation of a national army, one of the key institutions of independent sovereign states. King Faysal was surrounded by military men who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and were keen to establish an army in Iraq that would unite Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites through national military service. The project foundered in the face of active opposition from the Shiite and Kurdish communities, however, who objected to conscription as to any government initiative they believed gave disproportionate power to the minority Sunni Arab community. The Kurds presented a particular challenge to the integrity and identity of the Iraqi state. Unlike the Sunnis and Shiites, the Kurds are not ethnic Arabs and they resented government efforts to cast Iraq as an Arab state. They believed this denied the Kurds their distinct ethnic identity. Some in the Kurdish community did not resist Iraqi claims to Arabness but used this as a pretext to demand greater autonomy in those parts of northern Iraq in which they represented an absolute majority. At times it seemed that the only thing uniting the people of Iraq was their opposition to the British presence. King Faysal himself despaired of his subjects. Shortly before his death in 1933, the first king of Iraq observed in a confidential memo that ?there is still?and I say this with a heart full of sorrow?no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.?²⁷ For the British, the cost of maintaining order soon began to exceed the benefits of perpetuating the mandate in Iraq. By 1930 the British reassessed their position. They had secured their interests in Mesopotamian oil through the 1928 Red Line Agreement, which awarded Britain a 47.5 percent share in the Turkish (Iraq) Petroleum Company—the French and Americans had only secured 23.75 percent of the shares each. They had established a friendly and dependent government in Iraq, headed by a “reliable” king, to protect British interests. British officials in Iraq increasingly came to the view that they would better assure their strategic interests by treaty than by continued direct control. In June 1930, the British government concluded a new agreement to replace the controversial Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922. The terms of the new pact stipulated that Britain’s ambassador would enjoy preeminence among foreign representatives in Iraq. The Royal Air Force would retain two air bases in the country, and British troops would be assured transit rights through Iraq. The Iraqi military would be reliant on Britain for its training and provision of arms and ammunition. This still was not full independence, but it was enough to secure the country’s admission to the League of Nations. It also satisfied one of the main demands of Iraqi nationalists, who hoped the treaty would prove a first step toward independence. Upon ratification of the 1930 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, the British and Iraqis agreed to the termination of the mandate. On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent, sovereign state. Yet it was an ambiguous independence in which British civil and military officials continued to exercise more influence than was compatible with true Iraqi sovereignty. Such informal British controls would undermine the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy until its ultimate overthrow in 1958.

Egyptian nationalists looked on Iraq’s accomplishments with great envy. Though the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was not so different in content from Egypt’s 1922 treaty with Britain (which conceded nominal independence to Egypt), the Iraqis had secured Britain’s nomination for admission to that exclusive club of independent states, the League of Nations. This became the benchmark of success by which nationalists in other Arab countries would measure their own accomplishments. As the Arab country with the longest tradition of nationalist activity, Egypt should have led the way toward independence from European colonial rule?or so thought the political elite. In the course of the 1930s, the Wafd, Egypt?s leading nationalist party, came under growing public pressure to secure independence from Britain. During the interwar years, Egypt achieved the highest degree of multiparty democracy in the modern history of the Arab world. The Constitution of 1923 introduced political pluralism, regular elections to a two-chamber legislature, full male suffrage, and a free press. A number of new parties emerged on the political stage. Elections attracted massive turnout at the polls. Journalists plied their trade with remarkable liberty. This liberal era is remembered more for its divisive factionalism than as a golden age of Egyptian politics. Three distinct authorities sought preeminence in Egypt: the British, the monarchy, and, through Parliament, the Wafd. The rivalry between these three proved very disruptive to politics in Egypt. In his efforts to protect the monarchy from parliamentary scrutiny, King Fuad (r. 1917–1936) tended to oppose the nationalist Wafd party even more than the British. The Wafd, for their part, alternated between fighting the British for independence and promoting the powers of Parliament over the monarchy. The British alternately worked with the king to undermine the Wafd when they were in power, and with the Parliament to undermine the king when the Wafd was out of power. The political elites were a fractious bunch whose internecine squabbles played into the hands of both the king and the British. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that little progress was made in securing Egypt’s independence from Britain. Egyptians first went to the polls in 1924. Sa’d Zaghlul (1859–1927), hero of the nationalist movement of 1919, led his Wafd party to a sweeping victory and took 90 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. King Fuad named Zaghlul prime minister and invited him to form a government, which took office in March 1924. Buoyed by the public mandate of his election returns, Zaghlul immediately entered into negotiations with the British to secure Egypt’s complete independence, compromised only by the four “reserved points” of the 1922 treaty: British control over the Suez Canal, the right to base British troops in Egypt, preservation of the foreign legal privileges known as the Capitulations, and British dominance in Sudan. Sudan was a particular sticking point. The Egyptians had first conquered Sudan during the reign of Muhammad ’Ali in the 1820s. Driven from the territory by the Mahdi’s Revolt (1881–1885), the Egyptians joined forces with the British to reconquer Sudan in the late 1890s. In 1899 Lord Cromer devised a novel form of colonialism called a “condominium,” which allowed Britain to add Sudan to its empire in collaboration with the Egyptians. Since then, both Britain and Egypt claimed Sudan was actually their own. Egyptian nationalists rejected Britain’s claim to absolute discretion over Sudan in the 1922 treaty and demanded preservation of the ?unity of the Nile Valley.? This issue, more than any other of the four reserved points, provoked greatest tension between the Egyptians and the British. Tensions led to violence on November 19, 1924, when a band of Egyptian nationalists shot and killed the governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, as he drove through downtown Cairo. The stunned British government nonetheless used the assassination to secure their objectives in Sudan. Egypt’s high commissioner, Lord Allenby, presented Prime Minister Zaghlul with a punitive seven-point ultimatum, including changes to the status quo in Sudan. When Zaghlul refused to comply with British demands in Sudan (to withdraw all Egyptian soldiers and to allow Nile irrigation for a British agricultural scheme), Allenby gave orders to the Sudan government to implement Britain’s demands over the Egyptian prime minister’s objections. Zaghlul’s position was untenable, and he tendered his resignation on November 24. King Fuad named a royalist to form the next government and dissolved the Parliament, effectively sidelining the nationalists in the Wafd. As Zaghlul watched the British and the king enhance their powers at the Wafd’s expense, he famously remarked: “The bullets that were fired were not targeted at the chest of Sir Lee Stack; they were targeted at mine.”²⁸ In fact, Zaghlul never did return to power, dying on August 23, 1927, at the age of sixty-eight. Zaghlul would be replaced by lesser men, whose factionalism and in-fighting eroded public confidence in their political leaders.