Al-Ahram: A Diwan of contemporary life (620) When papers shift Professor Yunan Labib Rizk sees what newspapers, opposition and pro-government, had to say about the change of cabinet in 1937 On 30 December 1937 King Farouk I issued a royal decree dismissing the fourth government formed by Mustafa El-Nahhas. Unlike previous decrees dismissing governments, this one cited various allegations against the El-Nahhas government. It stated that the people no longer supported its method of rule because it defied the spirit of the constitution and failed to respect and protect civil liberties and justice. The novelty of this is all the more striking when one compares this decree to that issued by Fouad I in June 1928, dismissing El-Nahhas's first government. That decree cited only one cause: the irreparable rift in the coalition on the basis of which that government was formed. That reason at least had a solid basis in fact. Many historical studies have probed the circumstances surrounding Farouk's dismissal of the El-Nahhas government, which occurred barely five months after the young king was invested with his constitutional authorities. Among the works that treated the conflict between the palace and the leader of the Wafd Party, one which culminated in this action and their impact on political life in Egypt, is The History of Egyptian Cabinets by Yunan Labib Rizk. No study, however, discussed the attitude of the Egyptian press towards this conflict and the impact of the replacement of the El-Nahhas government by a government led by Liberal Constitutionalist leader Mohamed Mahmoud on the relationship between the executive authorities and the press. There is much to be gleaned from the pages of Al-Ahram on this subject, as over a period of two years the newspaper closely observed the differences in the relationship of the El-Nahhas and Mahmoud governments with the pro-government and opposition press. The stark shift in attitudes towards certain newspapers from one government to the next indicates that neither was entirely rational in its treatment of the press in general. They did, however, share an indulgence in the carrot-and-stick policy. Under El-Nahhas, the carrot was reserved for the pro- government newspapers, such as Al-Jihad and Al-Wafd Al-Misri, while the stick was wielded against the opposition mouthpieces, of course. Notable among these was Al-Balagh which had shifted its allegiances at the time from the Wafd Party to the palace. Adding insult to injury, the famous poet and journalist Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad had defected from Al-Jihad to Al-Balagh and the latter's editor-in-chief, Abdel-Qader Hamza, had been awarded the rank of pasha for having redirected the newspaper's compass from the Wafd to the palace. When the Mahmoud government took over, the carrots and sticks were apportioned in the reverse direction. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us turn back and leaf through the pages of Al-Ahram from 1937 to 1938 so that we can better get a sense of the consequences of being an opposition newspaper in Egypt. IN 1937, EL-NAHHAS was at the peak of his power. The year before, his government had concluded the Anglo- Egyptian Treaty that officially brought an end to the British occupation. This success was quickly followed by another, the Montreux Convention, which brought an end to the Capitulations system in accordance with which foreigners in Egypt had been guaranteed immunity from prosecution in Egyptian courts. Add to this the fact that during his third and fourth ministries (9 May 1936 to 30 December 1937), El-Nahhas was virtually unopposed by the palace. King Fouad had died shortly before El-Nahhas came to power and his successor was too young to assume his constitutional powers. The El-Nahhas government was thus in a position no other government had ever enjoyed before. And in the heady grip of all that power it began to behave in a way that no other government would have conceived of before. As always, it paraded its widespread popularity through the activities of the Wafd Party committees throughout the country and through its armies of student demonstrators, ever ready to take to the street when they received the signal from Wafdist headquarters. However, it also began to adopt fascist tactics. These did not just take the form of the so-called Blue Shirts, modelled after Mussolini's paramilitaristic Black Shirts. Contrary to the Wafd Party's own liberal tradition, the Wafdist government also clamped down heavily on the opposition and the opposition press in particular. Its first victim was Misr Al-Fatah (Young Egypt), the mouthpiece of the party by the same name. In June 1937, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Ahmed Hussein, was charged with "defamation of the character of a judge". The judge in question had issued a ruling ordering Misr Al-Fatah to vacate its premises. Hussein's trial had palpable political overtones, testimony to which is the fact that his defence team included such prominent figures as Wahib Doss. Nevertheless, as a graduate of the Faculty of Law, Hussein felt he should be the first to plead on his own behalf. His defence offers a lesson in the reality that not every famous politician makes a good lawyer. Hussein's argument was implausible. He told the court that he had personally revised the proofs of the paper containing his article in order to cross out the offensive comments about the judge, but that the printers went ahead and published the article as it had originally stood. A lawyer of the stature and expertise of Wahib Doss was required. It was he who turned the trial into a test of a general principle. This case did not affect Ahmed Hussein alone, Doss said. "It is a case that involves the entire judiciary and the rights the judiciary exercises over all citizens. It is the case of a judge defending his dignity and the case of the integrity that has been vested in the court." He then proceeded to lash out at the ruling the plaintiff had issued against Misr Al-Fatah. In the next session of the hearing, Hussein accused the El-Nahhas government of persecuting him. He told the court that after the previous session adjourned, the prosecution brought him in for interrogation over a previous article. He feared being subjected to similar treatment after every session since there were so many cases against him. And, indeed there were: he was charged with maligning the integrity of the government, inciting a group of Italians and, worst of all, slandering His Excellency El-Nahhas Pasha and the honourable Makram Ebeid. Hussein's lawyers asked the court to include those cases in the present hearing. That would be no small matter; apparently the documentation of the investigations came to more than 2,000 pages. Commenting on all this litigation against Hussein, one lawyer at the time remarked, "what else does he have to do? His whole job is to flirt with the government in order to get the government to flirt with him." Eventually, Hussein decided to focus the court's attention on the political motives behind the trial. It was the rivalry between the Wafd Party's Blue Shirts and his party's Green Shirts that was the real reason why the government was chasing him in the courts. To substantiate this claim he listed the forms of persecution the government had inflicted upon him and his supporters. He related to the court that the Ministry of Interior had prohibited the Green Shirts from travelling to Upper Egypt in their uniforms. This his men refused to accept. So after travelling to Shalal in ordinary clothes, they made their way back northwards on foot, after having put on their green shirts again in order to make themselves known to the fellahin. "This was a time when the people of Cairo fled to the beaches of the Mediterranean," he continued in an impassioned voice. "However, the government was not content to merely let my colleagues march beneath the blazing sun subsisting on the paltriest supplies of food. No, it had to tighten the noose by preventing them from communicating with the people." Although the El-Nahhas government had recently formed an amnesty commission whose task was to investigate cases involving journalists who had been wrongfully tried and sentenced and then petition for a pardon, the government was not about to let Ahmed Hussein and his newspaper off so easily. Cry as he might about the prejudice against him, the commission refused to take up his cause. The court found him guilty on all charges, sentencing him to three months prison with the sentence suspended on one and a fine of LE20 on another. The political tension surrounding the Hussein case made themselves literally present in the courtroom that day. Just before the judge pronounced the sentence a shouting match broke out in the audience. One of the defendant's supporters, Saleh Eissa El-Sudani, had mouthed insults against El-Nahhas, provoking a Wafd Party loyalist to respond. Needless to say, the Wafdist was let off while El-Sudani was arrested for disrupting the court. The Wafdist government wanted more than a stick to wield against the opposition press; it wanted a bludgeon. Towards this end it amended the penal code to provide for harsher punishment against publication offences. One of the new articles stipulated a fine of no less than LE50 and no more than LE100 against a journalist found guilty of insulting or slandering parliament, the army, the courts, the executive authorities or public agencies. Another article called for a maximum of a year in prison and a fine no less than LE20 and no more than LE100 for slandering public officials or representatives. Under a third article, journalists found guilty of publishing with malicious intent false information or documents that were fabricated, fraudulent or falsely attributed to other sources would be sentenced to 18 months in prison and a fine of no less than LE50. The government's second victim was Fatima Youssef, the owner and editor-in-chief of Rose El-Youssef magazine. In her memoirs, Youssef recounts that towards the end of 1935, the Wafd Party turned against her because of the stance she took against the Tawfiq Nassim government. She was thrown out of the party, her daily newspaper was suspended from publication, leaving her only the weekly magazine, then Rose El-Youssef offices were assaulted by the Wafd's Blue Shirts. In addition to these forms of harassment, she lost many of her most important staff writers, including Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad and Mahmoud Azmi. But that was not the end of it. The famous journalist and actress was not only dragged before the courts on several occasions but also ended up in prison. Thumbing through Al-Ahram 's archives on this subject, we learn that on 12 September 1937 she was prosecuted in connection with an article entitled "The big business government", which then minister of finance Makram Ebeid took as slander directed against himself. Youssef confessed in court to being solely responsible for the article. Soon afterwards she was tried on the charge of insulting El-Nahhas Pasha by publishing a cartoon of the prime minister bearing the caption, "From the cradle to the grave". Then she was brought up on the charge of defaming the government. The accusation was based on two articles, one entitled "The criminal cabinet" and the second, "Have we returned to the age of oppression, aggression and surveillance?" It eventually came to light that one of the reasons Fatima Youssef had drawn the government's wrath was that Rose El-Youssef offices were next door to the Young Egypt headquarters. In the course of its investigations into that group, the public prosecutor's office wanted to raid their headquarters. When police found all the entrances from the street blocked they turned to the Rose El-Youssef building which they knew had a side door from which they could gain access into the Young Egypt headquarters. Youssef refused to grant them permission, which led to a verbal altercation, which escalated into a physical brawl which in turn led to the prosecutor's office and the courts. Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad, who as we noted had defected from Al-Jihad to Al-Balagh, was the Wafdist government's third victim. What brought him into its crosshairs was an article that appeared on Al-Balagh 's front page entitled, "Go your own way and don't take the constitution with you!" El-Aqqad accused the Wafdist government of flouting the constitution in its every behaviour. To El-Nahhas and Ebeid, he said, the constitution means that they can do anything they want or the constitution and parliamentary life be damned. He also criticised that attitude that condensed the whole of the Egyptian people into the Wafd, the Wafd into the Wafd Party leadership, and that leadership into the person of Mustafa El-Nahhas "who does nothing except what Makram Ebeid wants him to do." The famous poet and journalist goes further. The Wafd, he said, pretends that the parliament exists independently of the government and that its purpose is to keep the government in check. He defied the government to prove this claim. In fact, he continues, "what the government expects from parliament is that it tell the people that parliament is nothing without Mustafa El-Nahhas and Makram Ebeid." These officials were the true enemies of the constitution, he proclaimed. It was up to parliament and the people to tell them to go. "If they go, they should go alone and leave the constitution intact. If they refuse to go alone, like the drowning person who clings to a swimmer, not to be saved but to drown the swimmer too, not only will they be ousted from power but they will drag the constitution down with them." Within a day and a half after this article appeared, El-Aqqad was summoned to the public prosecutor's office for interrogation. In the presence of his lawyer, Fathi Radwan, El-Aqqad denied that his article contained any slander or defamation. After a summary hearing, the chief prosecutor, Hassan Fahmi Bassiouni, ordered El-Aqqad detained for four days pending an investigation. Initially, El-Aqqad was to spend these four days in a foreigners' prison instead of the national prison or the Court of Appeals Prison. However, the powers that be felt that this would not teach El-Aqqad a good enough lesson. After one night in the comparative luxury of the foreigners' prison, El-Aqqad was transferred to the Court of Appeals Prison. Apparently, this was the worst of the lot. He described it as a "tomb" which in view of the various intestinal and pulmonary ailments he suffered, would threaten his life. El-Aqqad's lawyers, who now included Abdel-Rahman El-Rafie, raced to the prosecutor's office and after several meetings persuaded him to transfer their client to the national prison. On 5 September the national court convened to hear the objections of El-Aqqad's lawyers against the detention of their client. According to Al-Ahram 's correspondent on the scene, the courtroom was so packed with lawyers and journalists that the police had to be called in to keep the general public out. El-Aqqad and his lawyers seized the opportunity to place the government in the defendant's cage. The famous writer expounded upon the difference between democracy and dictatorship, asserting that the government had tended towards the latter through those actions that had led to his appearance in court that day. He went on to proclaim that in a democracy, no person should be considered as above criticism, for such immunity would threaten the very foundations of democratic government. El-Aqqad's lawyers lashed out against the precautionary detainment to which his client had been wrongfully subjected. Evidence needed to be gathered. In this case, they argued, the alleged crime was a journalistic offence, the body of evidence for which was the article in question. There were no witnesses that could be unduly influenced and their client, El-Aqqad, would never flee. The court, won over by the defence's pleas and perhaps too by the presence of so many lawyers and journalists in the courtroom, ruled to release El-Aqqad upon payment of a bond of LE20. Al-Ahram 's correspondent relates that the courtroom burst out in loud applause and cheers to the victory of justice. After paying his bond, El-Aqqad was escorted back to his home in Masr Al-Gadida by a large throng of his friends and supporters, proving that the pen of the writer can be mightier than the government's sword. Three months later, El-Aqqad came under government scrutiny again, this time for an article bearing the headline, "Supporters endanger the government". The article appeared in Al-Balagh of 15 December at the time of the intensifying showdown between El-Nahhas and the palace. In it, El-Aqqad commented on the government's tactic of mobilising its supporters to stage rallies in which the participants shouted cheers to the long life of El-Nahhas and Ebeid. In so doing, the government and its supporters were treading dangerous ground, El-Aqqad asserted. To encourage its supporters to such extremes of fanaticism was not in the government's interests and could well hasten its downfall. He concludes, "under a constitutional government, monarchs are raised from the cradle upon democratic manners and parliamentary traditions. The same cannot be said for prime ministers who come and go, returning after their rule to their place among the ruled. The government's supporters appear to have overlooked that reality, although they would be advised to remember it today." El-Aqqad was arrested the following day and incarcerated in the Court of Appeals prison. Once again his lawyers hastened to his defence to get him transferred to the national prison and then to court to protest against his detention. And, once again the judge ordered his release on bail, pending trial. LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER King Farouk dismissed the government and appointed Mohamed Mahmoud to form a new one. With the change, the Wafd and its newspapers moved into the opposition while Al-Balagh, Al-Dostour and others sided with the palace. One of the first actions of the new government was to issue a general amnesty that extended to all the press cases that had been tried under the previous government. Accordingly, Ahmed Hussein and Fatima Youssef were released. Then came the clampdown on Wafdist newspapers. The first step was to restrict their sale. The governor of Cairo issued regulations requiring newspaper vendors to obtain a licence to ply their trade. They were further required to wear a special uniform bearing an identity number and to assemble at regular intervals in the governorate building "to receive advice and special instructions". Although those instructions were never revealed, it required little intelligence to discern what their ultimate purpose was. The Wafdist press now was getting a dose of the medicine the El-Nahhas government had meted out to the opposition press when it was in power. Al-Misri and Al-Wafd Al-Misri were the two that were singled out for special treatment, and on what appeared to be very odd grounds. Mohamed Shafie El-Banna, editor-in-chief of Al-Misri, was arrested at least twice, once for having published a news item reporting that the Al-Zaqaziq police commissioner had been promoted to the post of deputy chief of a provincial directorate and another time for having published seven articles under the headline, "Now is the time to sign our names to our statements". The latter, the prosecution claimed, contained remarks "offensive to the royal personage," for which offence El-Banna was found guilty and sentenced to a LE20 fine. Whereas Al-Misri was a newspaper "founded upon the principles of the Egyptian Wafd Party" Al-Wafd Al-Misri was actually one of the party's mouthpieces. Not surprisingly, therefore, it came in for some heavier blows from the Mahmoud government, again on some paltry pretexts. Following the publication of an entirely ordinary news item speculating over the possibility that the government might resign, the newspaper's editor-in-chief, Abdel-Latif Sadeq, was charged with "incitement and slandering the government". The office of the prosecution detained him for four days pending an investigation. After spending the stipulated period in Darb Al-Ahmar jail he was released without bond. When his case was brought to trial Sadeq was found not guilty. Mahmoud has gone down in Egyptian history as the first Egyptian prime minister to hold rigged elections. And the parliamentary elections of 1938 were glaringly so. It was inconceivable that El-Nahhas and Ebeid could have been defeated in their home constituencies but according to the returns they were. It was only natural that the Wafd mouthpiece would air the party's disappointment and suspicions. For this Al-Wafd Al-Misri Editor-in-Chief Abdel-Latif Sadeq and Kawkab Al-Sharq Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Hafez Awad were brought in for questioning. Awad, whose newspaper had ceased publication at that time, was the author of the offensive article. The charge was ready in hand: slandering the government. Around mid-October 1938, Al-Misri and Al-Balagh engaged in a brief crossfire that encapsulated the state of the press at the time. The opening volley came from the Wafdist newspaper under the headline, "Are there two laws?" The author of the article asks, "would the government please explain to us how it is that while hundreds of Wafdist journalists are being dragged before the prosecution, shoved into prison and put on trial, not a single government journalist has been so much as brought in for simple questioning." He goes on to charge, "all the government newspapers, without exception, are teeming with obscenities, profuse in all forms of slander which should never be allowed in a country in which the law is held sacrosanct or inspires so much as a grain of awe in people's hearts. Are we not therefore to conclude that the law has come to be applied to some people and not to others?" Al-Balagh 's return fire was weak. The Wafdist newspaper's question had only one response, it wrote. "This is that in investigating any crime the public prosecution is only performing its duty. The prosecution is not an instrument serving private ends. When it mounts investigations, therefore, this furnishes no grounds for claims that we are living in an age of tyranny. Rather, this is proof that the agency is an instrument for safeguarding the law and is performing its duty to punish those who violate the law." Al-Ahram, meanwhile, was one of the few newspapers that remained unscathed by the swinging fortunes of the press with the replacement of El-Nahhas government by the Mahmoud government. Undoubtedly, the newspaper's reputation for objectivity, non-partisanship and accurate reporting goes a long way in explaining why it was spared the government's stick and was never tempted by the government's carrot. Indeed, Al-Ahram 's long established integrity has always earned it the respect of all Egyptian governments.
