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This chapter examines the legitimacy crisis that developed in Egypt during 1946, when the government of Prime Minister Ismail Sidqi found itself caught between the dictates of the international system and the angry demands of Egyptian nationalists. On the one hand, Britain demanded that Egypt remain within the imperial sphere of influence. On the other hand, nationalist opinion claimed the right to withdraw from the British security zone and called for the unity of Egypt and the Sudan under the crown of King Faruq. In October 1946, Ismail Sidqi and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin compromised, arriving at a draft for a new treaty. The agreement fell due to opposition from the Wafd, the Muslim Brothers, Makram Ubayd's party, the student organizations, and a host of prominent politicians. The experience of Sidqi Pasha in 1946 proved that the Anglo-Egyptian military alliance was illegitimate in Egyptian politics. It would not be long before this truism clearly guided the foreign policy of Cairo.

The Introduction examines the largely ignored question of to what extent Muslim law was applied in medieval Muslim states and whether its precepts indeed governed the life of individuals and the conduct of society. The Introduction also provides a unifying framework for the book and presents topics, which are directly relevant to the discussion of the administration of justice. The inquiry is also heavily influenced and informed by the progress that has been made in recent decades in the study of early Islam.

This chapter focuses on the self-proclaimed embodiment of 1919 and the Egyptian national soul, the Wafd Party. It counters the view that the Wafd was an elitist, only superficially liberal, grouping. Less emphasis has been placed upon ideology than other factors in the analysis of Egyptian politics in this period. Exploring Egyptian political party documents, British government archives, and memoirs, this chapter highlights the ideologically dynamic nature of the 1920s, when ideas of nationhood, citizenship, cultural orientation, labor, and gender remained hotly contested. Ultimately, rather than an elite-driven political consensus during the first decade of Egyptian independence, this chapter finds that the Wafd Party adopted approaches of pre-World War I Egyptian nationalists, and was thus much more radical than scholars have assumed.

This chapter examines the background to the Free Officers' coup d'etat and the political bickering that followed by focusing on the parliamentary regime in its last years, between January 1950 and July 23, 1952. During this period, reform-minded members of the political establishment clashed with those who continued to play politics as usual. Their failures resulted in the end of liberalism in Egypt. The chapter first provides an overview of how competing interests, both foreign and national, doomed Egypt's parliamentary order from the outset before discussing the election of a Wafdist government in 1950 and its eventual failure. It then analyzes the events that served as a prelude to the Free Officers' rising around which disaffected liberals, progressives, communists, and the Muslim Brotherhood constructed a new savior myth: that a military junta would, after imposing constitutional reform, restore parliamentary life and then return to the barracks.

In November 1922, just months after Britain's unilateral declaration of Egypt's independence, the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb was caught up in a decolonization struggle between Egyptian nationalists and Western archaeological interests. Lord Carnarvon's sale of exclusive publication rights to the London Times provoked a storm of opposition in the Arabic, British, and American press. Clashing with the Egyptian Antiquities Service over visitors to the tomb, Howard Carter locked it up, refused to do further work, and sued the Egyptian government. Egypt's new independence, however, proved to have enough teeth to avoid the customary division of the finds between the government and the excavators: Tutankhamun's treasures were all retained in Cairo to become the glory of the Egyptian Museum. The discovery intensified pharaonism as a component of 1920s Egyptian nationalism as Saad Zaghlul, his Wafd Party, and others pushed for fuller independence. Ahmad Shawqi penned a celebrated ode on Tutankhamun. Although both Western and Egyptian “Tutmania” fell off considerably from the 1930s through the 1950s, it surged once more in the 1960s, after full independence enabled Egypt to lend out Tutankhamun objects for blockbuster exhibitions abroad.

Chapter 6 (“Counter-Clockwise Revolution”) is devoted to a series of public demonstrations, transportation and communications cutoffs, and strikes collectively known as Egypt’s 1919 anticolonial revolution. The “networked” nature of the colonial project in Egypt opened it up for contestation and disruption along technological lines. Railway, telephone, tramway, and telegraph lines connected the different dots of conflicting reasons and rationales for revolutionary violence into a seemingly unified broader picture. This misrepresentation of the revolt benefitted middle-class nationalists, whom the British imagined to be in control of the chaotic events. Meanwhile, the suspension of modern networks was viewed by many Egyptians as pushing Egypt back in time to a slower era of solidarity in which social barriers—including the physical class-system in trains and trams—were removed.

This chapter focuses on the formal aspects of the establishment of the Revolution’s Court and its procedures. It argues that the manner in which the establishment of the court was announced, the choice of name and location for its operation, the design of the courtroom, and, most important, the decree determining the court’s authority and its procedure all point to the way in which the RCC perceived the special court and its objectives. The rhetoric that accompanied the stage on which the special court was set became even more pronounced in the court deliberations. This chapter analyzes the first two sessions in Ibrahim ‛Abd al-Hadi’s trial. It concludes that the procedural aspects of the establishment of the special courts directly corresponded to the positions of the parties with regard to the charges brought against the accused and the historical and political context in which he operated.