World War I, which 100 years ago engulfed Europe, Africa and the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, may have brought unspeakable destruction to the world as a whole, but for Egypt it was a bridge to a new way of life that was more Westernised and yet more nationalistic, less conservative and yet fearful of letting go of tradition, richer and yet more concerned about the country's poor. The cast of belligerents differed only slightly from that of World War II some two decades later, and it pitted the Allies against the Central Powers. Britain, France and Russia were the original Allies, later joined by the US, Italy and Japan. Germany and Austria-Hungary led the Central Powers, which also included the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. The war was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo at the hands of a Serbian nationalist. The Austrians reacted by giving an ultimatum to Serbia, and within months the nations of Europe and the world were drawn into the conflict. Many of the humanitarian laws we have today owe their onset to the atrocities of this war. Chemical weapons were used for the first time on a large scale, triggering scenes of unprecedented horror, and the bombing of cities from the air, coupled with the use of machine guns, added to the scale of the slaughter. Once the Ottoman Empire had thrown in its lot with the Central Powers, the Arab world was faced with a difficult choice. Torn between their loyalty to tradition and their dreams of independence, it took only a little prodding from the Allies to lure many Arab nationalists to their cause. In Mecca, the Sharif Hussein bin Ali started what became known as the Arab Revolt, remembered in history and enshrined in film as a glorious struggle that took the Sharif's forces all the way to Syria under the ministration of British intelligence, the legendary T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, in his white flowing robes leading the charge. The leaders of the Arab Revolt dreamt of an expanded state, ruled by the Arabs, that would replace the Ottoman Empire but retain its unity. What they got instead was a series of fragmented territories, with Palestine — or at least part of it — promised to the Zionist movement. Infuriated by the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France that carved up the former Ottoman Empire and the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government to the Zionists, the Arabs decided to go it alone. In 1920, they declared Syria to be an independent state under prince Faisal Ibn Hussein, but this first attempt at Arab nationalism failed due to French intervention. Deprived of Syria, Faisal settled for the new state of Iraq, a country he ruled until his death in 1933. Libya was grabbed by the Italians, Syria and Lebanon by the French, and Egypt, Sudan and Transjordan continued under British rule. In Egypt, the British replaced the independent-minded Khedive Abbas II with his uncle, Sultan Hussein Kamel, whom they deemed to be more malleable. Political intrigue, mixed with local resentment of the British, played a role in the wave of political assassinations that followed. On 8 April 1915, while Sultan Hussein's procession was passing through Abdine Street in Cairo, chief of staff Said Zulfiqar, sitting next to the sultan, noticed a young man getting too close to the royal carriage. Just as Zulfiqar alerted the guard, the young man raised a bouquet of red flowers and pulled out a pistol. He fired a single shot, missing the sultan but hitting the vehicle. The would-be assassin was a 27-year-old merchant from Mansoura. On 9 July 1915, as the sultan was heading out to attend Friday prayers in Alexandria, assailants again tossed a bomb at him that rolled under the wheels of his carriage without detonating. The police said that the bomb had been thrown from the window of a house on Ras Al-Tin Street. Following the assassination attempt, the sultan spoke to Faris Nimr, editor of the pro-British newspaper Al-Mokattam. “If I were sure that these incidents had been committed by evil people, I wouldn't give them a second thought. But my greatest concern is that there is a seed of corruption in this country as a whole,” he said. The sultan was not the only person targeted for his presumed collaboration with the British occupiers. Ibrahim Fathi, minister of awqaf, or religious endowments, was on an inspection tour of Upper Egypt when during a stop at a train station a man carrying a newspaper approached him. In the newspaper, the man had hidden a double-edged dagger with which he stabbed the minister three times, once in the shoulder and twice in the face. The assailant, police later said, was a 35-year-old employee in the ministry of finance. During his interrogation, the man told the police that he had intended to kill other cabinet members as well, because “all the ministers are traitors and deserve to die.” Meanwhile, the Ottoman army was fighting for dear life during the war. It sent troops to Sinai to harass the British and paid rebel groups in Libya to resist the Italians. Following skirmishes near Ismailia, the Ottoman forces pulled back to Qutba, Bir Dweidar and Al-Tor in Sinai. In the Western Desert, fighting went on in earnest between pro-Ottoman forces and the Italians. The Ottomans backed an insurgent group led by Ahmed Senousi, who in September 1915 launched an attack on Egypt's western borders. Before the British had had the time to react, Senousi's forces had seized Salloum. As the fighting spread, German submarines also managed to sink British ships near Marsa Matrouh. The British soldiers who made it to the shore were promptly captured by Senousi's forces. On 31 May 1916, Britain declared martial law in Egypt over an area extending from the Mediterranean in the north to Sudan in the south and from Tripoli in the west to the Nile in the east. They also began aiding the Italians in their war with Senousi. Meanwhile, the sultan of Darfur in Sudan, Ali bin Dinar, wanted to retain his country's independence from the French and the British, both of whom were stationed far too close for comfort. When he started aiding anti-French forces in the region of Wadah, the sultan invoked the ire of the British in Egypt, who sent a battalion of the Egyptian army to occupy Al-Fashir and depose him. On 12 November 1916, the Egyptian papers reported the death of Ali bin Dinar. Law and order started to falter in Egypt as the war took its toll on the security forces. According to Egyptian historian Mohamed Sayed Al-Kilani, theft and robbery became commonplace, with even some of the educated class turning to crime. As more British soldiers joined the war effort, more and more of them started to spend their leave around the Azbakiya Gardens in Cairo, where bars and houses of ill repute sprang up almost overnight to cater to the young servicemen. Cairo became crowded with refugees, some from Syria and others from Europe. As their numbers increased, sanitation deteriorated, and the city was hit by cholera, typhoid and other epidemics. The closer contact between the east and west brought about by World War I ignited debate over the status of women in Egypt. Some writers argued that Egyptian women should shed their veils and wear European attire, while others defended the old ways. One newspaper that participated in this debate was Al-Sufour, which can be translated loosely as “without the veil”. Not only did this publication stand up for women's rights, but it also published the work of non-religious writers and poets, a bold statement in a country that was still largely conservative beneath a thin Westernised veneer. Although wartime brought windfalls to the suppliers of the British army, government revenue dropped due to the dwindling taxation on foreign trade, which had now nearly ceased. When the government fired some of its temporary employees, the latter took to the streets on 1 September 1914, demanding to be reinstated. Marching on the offices of the Cairo governorate in Bab Al-Khalq, they looted stores and other buildings on their way. It was around this time that Abdel-Rahman Al-Rafei, a commentator, started advocating the idea of cooperatives. Writing in 1914, Al-Rafei discussed the financial troubles of Egyptian farmers and drew up guidelines for creating agricultural cooperatives to facilitate credit. Another writer, Sadek Honein, argued in 1917 that workers, merchants and self-employed professionals should be represented in parliament. Mohamed Hussein Heikal's book Socialism Moves Forward also elaborated on the need for social justice. With Soviet Russia posing as a new model for a more egalitarian form of society after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many Egyptians now started to consider socialism to be a viable model. Sultan Hussein himself was remarkably open to the idea. Speaking to an Italian journalist, he said that “I only know one type of socialist, and they seek what is good for humanity. I am also a socialist, because I love humanity too.” As Egypt moved further away from its Ottoman past, the judiciary started to rely less on Sharia law and more on European-style legislation. Personal status laws related to marriage and inheritance remained in the realm of Sharia, but instead of depending on the Hanafi doctrine alone a committee of Al-Azhar-trained scholars and professors was formed in order to arrive at unified laws based on all four schools of Sunni Islam. The secularisation of the legal system proceeded by fits and starts, with some writers railing against what they saw as the government's excessive Westernisation of the country. Mohamed Rashid Reda, writing in the newspaper Al-Manar, penned a series of articles entitled “The Westernised and Islamic Reform”, for example. Faced by this kind of repeated opposition, the government was forced to tone down the western tilt of its reform programme. In literature, the war also fired the imaginations of a new breed of writers who found a wealth of material in the rapid changes taking place in the country. Writing in Al-Sufour, Mohamed Tawfik Diab and Mansour Fahmi advocated the case for social justice through colourful descriptions of the conditions of the poor. Mustafa Sadek Al-Rafei encouraged the poor to rise up in revolt against the rich. Brilliant vernacular poets like Mohamed Abdel-Nabi, Hussein Shafik Al-Masri, and Younis Al-Qadi wrote songs whose lyrics are still known today. One example is the popular song by Al-Qadi that goes “O, beloved eye, I want to go back to my country. O my country, the government has taken away my son,” (ya aziz eini ana biddi arawwah baladi. Baladi ya baladi, wes solta khadet waladi). Acting, until then a lowly profession, also suddenly became fashionable, with actors now making monthly salaries of LE20-60 per month, five or six times the salary of a middle-ranking government official. One of the theatre hits of the time was Khalli Balak Min Emily, a play that the Aziz Eid company launched in 1915, with the future journalist and publisher Rose El-Youssef winning accolades for her acting in the role of Emily, a rebellious young woman. In September 1915, the singer Munira Al-Mahdiya also appeared on stage in an acting role, the first time a top-level professional singer had participated in this new form of entertainment.
