The last few weeks have witnessed the centennial celebrations of Egypt's 1919 Revolution. The event was celebrated by Egyptian journalists and intellectuals and by some universities and civil-society organisations. However, the government, with the exception of the Ministry of Culture which organised a three-day conference to commemorate the revolution, largely ignored the event. In fact, government officials held parallel celebrations to commemorate Martyrs' Day, the day on which field-marshal Abdel-Moneim Riad was killed by an Israeli raid while visiting the troops during the War of Attrition in 1969. On that day, the president of the republic gave a speech to a military audience that highlighted the feats and sacrifices of the Egyptian military and police. He made no mention of the centennial of the 1919 Revolution. The varying responses of the state and civil-society organisations to this event raise important questions about Egyptian national identity and political culture. It can be argued that Egyptian national identity is defined by two momentous events in the country's modern history, the 1919 and the 1952 Revolutions, and that contestation over the significance of these two events continues to define the national debate in Egypt. The 1919 Revolution was led by Egyptian professionals and intellectuals from the middle classes and was supported by broad segments of the population including landowners, workers and peasants. The revolution broke out in response to Britain's refusal to allow a delegation (wafd) led by Saad Zaghloul and his colleagues to attend the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to advocate for Egyptian national independence. When Britain banished Zaghloul and his colleagues to Malta, protests broke out across Egypt, and millions of Egyptians signed powers of attorney authorising Saad and his colleagues to represent the Egyptian people at the Paris Conference. Confronted with this wave of protest, Britain had to concede and agreed to allow the Egyptian delegation to go to Paris. While the 1919 Revolution revolved primarily around the issue of national independence from Britain in the wake of the First World War, it also championed a number of other values. These included national unity between Christians and Muslims and the principle of parliamentary and constitutional rule vis-à-vis the absolutist power of the monarchy. The achievements of the 1919 Revolution included the 1922 Treaty with Britain and the 1923 Constitution. The 1922 Treaty granted Egypt limited and conditional independence, and the 1923 Constitution envisioned a constitutional monarchy with power divided between parliament and monarch. However, in reality the palace and the British continued to dominate Egyptian politics, and the Wafd Party, though it commanded widespread popular support, was not allowed to exercise effective political power. Minority coalitions supported by the king were used in order to sideline the Wafd from governing for the greater part of the 1923-1952 period. The marginalisation of the Wafd, the corruption of political life under the monarchy and the continued domination of the British over Egyptian politics, coupled with a deepening social and economic crisis, led to widespread discontent among broad segments of the population and the emergence of a number of radical movements outside the formal political system including the Muslim Brotherhood, Young Egypt and the Communist movement. Moreover, the domination of a narrow landowning elite and a predominantly foreign-born bourgeoisie over the Egyptian economy foreclosed the possibility of genuine social and economic reform and hence of social mobility for the vast majority of the Egyptian population. The Free Officers that later led the 1952 Revolution came of age in this turbulent environment and developed a deep animosity towards both the monarchy and parliamentary and party politics which they perceived as weak, divisive and corrupt. Shortly after assuming power on 23 July 1952, Gamal Abdel-Nasser and the Free Officers Movement abolished the Egyptian monarchy and dismantled the political parties including the Wafd. In the National Charter published in 1962, Nasser, now president, launched a vehement attack on the 1919 Revolution and its leaders. He maintained that the revolution had failed due to three factors. First, it had completely ignored demands for social and economic reform as a result of the domination of the landed elite over the political parties. Second, it had ignored the threat of the newly established Israeli state in Palestine and the importance of Arab unity. Third, the methods favoured by the 1919 leaders that had emphasised peaceful resistance and negotiations had led to a largely nominal independence and allowed the British to continue to manipulate and dominate Egyptian politics. In the chapter entitled “the lessons of the Naksa,” or setback, meaning the 1919 Revolution and its aftermath, Nasser maintained that the leaders of the revolution, though they had had the wide support of the Egyptian population, had nonetheless opted to align themselves with the landowners and the parasitic bourgeoisie. Hence, the democracy that they had established was nothing but a humiliating distraction hiding the reality that the Egyptian people had no real political or economic power. According to Nasser, the aim of the 1952 Revolution was to establish a progressive democracy in place of the sham democracy of the earlier liberal era, which he labelled a reactionary dictatorship. Progressive democracy, according to Nasser, could not be separated from social democracy, and the right to vote was meaningless unless citizens were free from all forms of exploitation, inequality and fear. In place of the fake democracy of the 1919 Revolution, the 1952 Revolution thus sought to establish a true democracy based on social and economic justice. This was to be achieved through an alliance with the working people within the context of the newly established Arab Socialist Union, later renamed the National Democratic Party, which continued to dominate political life in Egypt until the events of 25 January 2011. Thus, it can be argued that the 1952 Revolution largely defined itself in opposition to the 1919 Revolution, which it perceived as feudal, inward-looking and reactionary. Instead of the perceived weakness, corruption and divisiveness of the parliamentary and party politics associated with the 1919 Revolution, the 1952 elite proposed a pyramidal model of exercising political power that was meant to ensure stability, order and efficiency and to deliver economic and social justice. To this day, these two events continue to shape the political imagination of the Egyptian elites. On the one hand, there are those who embrace the liberal values of the 1919 Revolution with its emphasis on pluralism, liberalism and parliamentary rule. On the other hand, there are those who eschew the divisiveness and messiness of party politics and embrace a top-down model of exercising political power instead. These different outlooks on the significance and legacies of the 1919 and 1952 Revolutions explain the divergent reactions of the Egyptian state versus segments of Egyptian civil society towards the recent centennial celebrations of the 1919 Revolution. 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The writer is a senior researcher at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
