Search Results

The introduction of the book gives an overview of the way 1919 is articulated in dominant historiography and sketches an alternative understanding of this key moment of Egypt’s anti-colonial struggle. The chapter also analyses the iconic status of both Saad and Safiyya Zaghlul in the Egyptian imaginary. It then turns to exploring the dynamics of remembering and forgetting 1919, and questions the politics of erasure at work in canonical Egyptian novels and films.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hassan al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood grew into a mass movement, but the retreat of pharaonism before Islam and Arabism was not the rout that is sometimes assumed. Some deplored the pitting of pharaonism against Islam and Arabism as a false dichotomy and embraced the entire Egyptian past. Saad Zaghlul's mausoleum and his statues in Cairo and Alexandria were steeped in pharaonism. Even those with little interest in ancient Egypt took pride in Selim Hassan's and Sami Gabra's discoveries and advancing careers. Journalist Salama Musa, who had named his own son Khufu for the builder of the Great Pyramid, stood by his earlier pharaonist nationalism. Among the younger generation, Ahmad Husayn confessed to “pharaonic mania” even as his Young Egypt movement took on a more Islamic tone, King Faruq avidly collected pharaonic antiquities, schoolboy Gamal Abdel Nasser thrilled to Tawfiq al-Hakim's pharaonist Return of the Spirit, and Naguib Mahfouz set his first three novels in ancient Egypt.

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.

This chapter focuses on memoirs of 1919. While most autobiographical recollections of the revolution are written by well-known actors in the events, this chapter looks at a different type of memoir, published in the seventies by a privileged witness. In Min Wahid li-‘Ashara, (From One to Ten, 1977), the well-known journalist Mustafa Amin (1914-97) recollects his childhood in his grandfather Saad Zaghlul’s home, narrating the chaotic 1919 days from inside Bayt al-Umma. Amin’s documenting of the revolution is one that unsettles dominant representations of 1919. Instead of orderly demonstrations glorifying national unity, it is chaos, conflict and carnival that prevail in Amin’s narrative. Min Wahid li-‘Ashara rehabilitates revolutionary violence, both spontaneous and organised, and opens space for the parole of the revolution’s marginalised actors. Moreover, the chapter shows that Amin’s memoirs are marked by the historical and personal moment in which he writes, and function as a conscious attempt at restoring Zaghlul’s legacy into the post-Nasser era. The chapter contains as well a brief analysis of autobiographical narratives by Saad Zaghlul himself, Mustafa al-Nahhas, Fakhri ‘Abd al-Nur, ‘Abd al-Rahman Fahmi, Huda Sha‘rawi, ‘Iryan Yusuf Sa‘d and Shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahab al-Naggar.

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.