Nawal Mustafa
PhD Candidate, Department of International Relations
The London School of Economics and Political Science
The Empire Chants Back: Revolutionary Movements,
Protest Politics, and the Arts of Discontent in Colonial Egypt
In 1919, Egyptian revolutionaries constructed their subjecthood, their very sense of
ethical self, through a series of compelling performances, emotively powerful as they were
visually disruptive. In the first instance, revolutionary subjects are constituted by an assemblage
of power-knowledge relations, which form a global space which legitimizes certain narratives,
identities, and modes of claim-making while marginalizing others. In 1919, revolutionary
activism was shaped by a global order in crisis, an assemblage that was in the process of being
contested and dramatically reconfigured. The postwar order as an assemblage was structured by
epistemic-cultural fields which encompassed the following features: 1) discourses of national
self-determination which were used to define and contest global understandings of legitimacy;
and 2) the discourses propagated by empires such as Great Britain which portrayed their subjects
as objects of rule within a hierarchical, racialized, and gendered colonial order. This global
discursive terrain encompassed a series of overlapping fields which, as a social space, greatly
influenced the character of counter-discourses, symbolic performances, and the anti-colonial and
nationalist identities Egyptians constructed to advance their claims for political independence.
This paper contends that by analyzing the performativity of subjectivities as sites of
interaction, it is possible to identify and trace how certain global power-knowledge relations
operate at their points of application, namely in terms of their structural and constitutive effects
on this field (Foucault 1982). As will be discussed, the tropes, images, and iconography of the
1919 revolution formed a direct response to such discourses and their ordering concepts. Within
British colonial discourse for example, Egyptian society was frequently portrayed as being
incapable of exercising self-determination given its social construction as being effeminate,
emasculate, and infantilized, a racialized and gendered representation which symbolically
portrayed the nation as not meeting the extant standards of civilization (Baron 2005).
British officials frequently justified protracted rule and unprecedented social
interventions into Egyptian society on the grounds that Egyptian family life needed reform to
produce good government. During the occupation, officials such as Lord Cromer frequently
equated the familial and domestic lives, even the sexual practices of the Khedives, the rulers of
Egypt, with the broader society as a whole. Ottoman practices such as veiling, the seclusion of
upper-class women within harem households, and polygamy were systematically referred to in
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colonial discourse to construct Egyptian society as incapable of achieving self-rule,
development, and good government (Cromer 1910/2010: 580-581).
The Oriental, as Edward Said reminds us, was equated with the identity of groups which
occupied the margins of Western societies such as the irrational delinquent, women, and the
lower classes, “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as
citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined” (Said 1979: 207). The other in
colonial discourse was frequently feminized and infantilized in a binary which contrasted with
the equally essentialized Western masculine and sovereign subject. Cultural, religious, and
gendered constructions of difference were not mutually exclusive, but formed an assemblage of
signifiers which together enabled the imagination of both self and other to be possible
(Yegenoglu 1998: 1-2). Gendered relations of power are thus not marginal in this discussion, but
are key to understanding how colonial discourses were articulated, how imperial powerknowledge networks and relations functioned both discursively and in practice, and finally, how
such articulations influenced attempts by revolutionaries, especially women, to reclaim their very
humanity (Williams and Chrisman 1994: 23).
As in other colonial contexts, family politics and gender relations in the Middle East were
frequently used to measure stages of development and civilizational progress (Kabeer 1994,
Stoler 2002). Lord Cromer, formerly Evelyn Baring before his promotion, served as the Consul
General, the senior British official post in Egypt from 1882-1907. His views left an indelible
imprint on the character of the occupation. He summarily expressed a position which illustrates
how systematic the gendered aspect of the discourse was, “There can be no doubt that a real
advance has been made in the material progress of this country during the past few years.
Whether any moral progress is possible in a country where polygamy and the absence of family
life blights the whole social system is another question” (Cromer quoted in Pollard 2005: 93).
This view was further elaborated in his autobiography, Modern Egypt, which was readily
available to the Egyptian public:
Looking then solely to the possibility of reforming those countries which have adopted
the faith of Islam, it may be asked whether anyone can conceive the existence of true
European civilization on the assumption that the position women occupy in Europe
is abstracted from the general plan. As well can a man be blind from his birth be made
to conceive the existence of color? Change the position of women, one of the main
pillars, not only of European civilization but at all events of the moral code based
on the Christian religion, if not Christianity itself falls to the ground. The position
of women in Egypt, and in Mohammedan countries generally, is, therefore a fatal
obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should
accompany the introduction of European civilization, if that civilization is to produce
its full measure of beneficial effect (Baring 1910/2010: 883).
In another instance, he added, “Inasmuch as women, in their capacities as wives and
mothers, exercise a great influence over the characters of their husbands and sons, it is obvious
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that the seclusion of women must produce a deteriorating effect on the male population, in whose
presumed interests the custom was originally established, and is still maintained” (Baring
1910/2010: 580). Colonial officials were unhesitant in depicting Egyptian society not only in
feminizing, but in infantilizing terms. Various officials characterized Egyptians as small children
who were underdeveloped, stunted, and in need of proper tutelage under British parental
supervision. In his critique of practices of veiling, seclusion, and polygamy, practices which
were quite common throughout the Ottoman Empire at the time, Cromer viewed Egyptians as
not possessing family values, which were deemed to affect their political judgment. According to
this conception, British overseers should play the role of parents guiding the nation to its proper
stage of development, “The effects of polygamy are more baneful and far-reaching than those of
seclusion. The whole fabric of European society rests upon the preservation of family life.
Monogamy fosters family life, polygamy destroys it. The monogamous Christian respects
women…the Moslem on the other hand, despises women” (Baring 1910/2010: 581).
Domestic and gendered familial practices, especially on the part of the ruling elite, thus
inflected representations of the other and were used to justify an increasingly ambitious program
of colonial intervention in the name of reform. Lord Milner echoed this sentiment in his volume
England in Egypt that the “childlike and dependent” Egyptians “lack the strenuousness and the
progressive spirit which would characterize any equally intelligent race tilling a less bounteous
soil and breathing a more bracing atmosphere. Such a race will not of itself develop great men or
new ideas, or take a leading part in the progress of mankind. But under proper guidance it is
capable of enjoying much simple content” (Milner 1898/2002: 314).
Dominant discourses often influence and structure the shape of counter-discourses which
reappropriate certain tropes, symbols, and slogans in order to disrupt existing power relations. As
Homi Bhabha once argued, (1994: 122-123), discursive representations of colonial selves and
others were ambiguous and ridden with internal tensions, a tenuous dynamic which provided
ample space for actors to contest and negotiate the terms of self-representation: the master’s tools
were used to dismantle his house. As various postcolonial theorists have noted, gender—in the
sense of constructed understandings of both masculinity and femininity—was equated by both
colonial authorities and nationalists as synonymous with the state of the nation, and its
progression along linear stages of development in order to assess issues such as “good
government” or the capacity to self-govern (Rai 2013). The relationship between such discourses
is best understood as the socially constructed interplay between the two sets of identities, a
process which occurred in a mutually constitutive fashion. Like their counterparts in other
colonial contexts, Egyptians constructed the national self through renegotiating both masculine
and feminine identities as sites of social power.
In an unexpected sense, British colonial administrators and Egyptian nationalists agreed
on one matter—the family unit was viewed as a direct metaphor for the nation. The status of
women as mothers and wives was viewed as not only central to the development of the national
family, but as an aspect of assessing the location of societies within global civilizational and
racial hierarchies. Both the colonizers and the colonized struggled to control dominant narratives
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by portraying the Egyptian national family as either healthy or decrepit. For both sides, a key
dimension of the struggle to control the national narrative involved turning women’s bodies and
minds into targets for intervention within projects of social reform in the late nineteenth century
(Badran 1988, Baron 2005).
The nationalist project from the 1890s onward was equally gendered and developed
counter-discourses in the popular press which took up the issue of women’s emancipation to
legitimate claims to civilizational maturity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, some of the most contested topics among nationalists concerned social reform in the
areas of girl’s and women’s education, Islamic laws concerning polygamy and divorce, and
debates pertaining to veiling in terms of women’s access to public space. In this respect,
gendered relations of power were not marginal to nationalist or revolutionary discourses; the
“Egyptian question” was synonymous with “the woman question” (Baron 1991, 2005; Booth
2001). For Egyptian nationalists, “If society at large was to be regenerated, liberated, and made
progressive, it was the woman’s position that had to be improved first of all. Only if she were
educated and liberated could she, in turn, educate her children to be members of a free and
progressive society. Only if she were able to fulfill her ‘natural duties,’ that is, as mother and
wife, could there be hope for a general improvement of national society” (Philipp 1978: 285).
A Reclamation of Subjecthood
In 1919, Egyptian activists, especially women from all social classes, attempted to
reappropriate such gendered narratives of the nation to obtain legitimacy before global and local
audiences alike for the cause of national independence from British rule. For them, Egypt was
experiencing a dramatic rebirth as the country traversed one stage of development to another.
The gendered language, imagery, and iconography of Egyptian revolutionary subjecthood thus
contested the equally gendered images and discourses of the occupation and the prevalent
imperial order. Within their contentious performances and literary tracts, revolutionaries
portrayed the Egyptian nation as a reformed family, one which evoked domestic imagery such as
narratives of mothering and nurturing the nation to its full fruition. In this vein, the Wafd leaders
of the uprising, especially Sa’d Zaghlul and his wife Safiyya, were constructed as symbolic
heads of the national family. It is no coincidence that Zaghlul’s residence was called the “House
of the Nation” and Safiyya was endearingly titled “The Mother of the Nation” (Hatem 2000).
One of the more important developments of the revolution is that for the first time in the
country’s history, women from all social classes attempted to reclaim their subjecthood both
from the colonial authorities and Egyptian nationalists who depicted them as passive objects in
need of social intervention and reform. As their relatives, husbands, and sons were arrested and
imprisoned, women activists played a key role in coordinating demonstrations, boycotts, strikes,
and the petition-writing which became central features of the revolution. They contributed to
innovating contentious performances which are still utilized by Egyptian activists at present: in
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response to colonial discourses which justified protracted rule in the name of women’s
emancipation and the protection of religious minorities, Egyptian Muslim and Christian Coptic
women symbolically expressed interfaith solidarity and national unity by displaying flags with
bore the cross and the crescent together during their demonstrations. They also conducted
peaceful assemblies at religious sites where imams delivered speeches from church pulpits, while
Coptic priests performed the same task at mosques such as Al-Azhar (Marsot 1978). As Huda
Sha’arawi, a leader of Egypt’s feminist movement during the interwar period, contended after
the episode, “The British claimed our national movement was a revolt of the Muslim majority
against religious minorities. This slander aroused the anger of the Copts and other religious
groups. Egyptians showed their solidarity by meeting together in mosques, churches, and
synagogues. Shaikhs walked arm in arm with priests and rabbis” (Sa’adawi 1986: 119).
Such activists deliberately used disciplined, nonviolent methods of resistance and
textually portrayed themselves as being “peaceful” and “orderly” to demonstrate civilizational
parity with the West. Revolutionaries constructed their subjectivities through a few discursive
moves: the first strategy involved the attempt to reverse colonial binaries between self/other,
civilized/savage, masculine/feminine, and West/non-West through civic forms of resistance.
Civic performances such as petition-writing, economic boycotts, and peaceful protests were not
only used to construct a feminine revolutionary identity, but were presented as a marked contrast
to the arbitrarily “violent,” “savage,” “masculine,” and “barbarous” acts of British soldiers. A
second discursive move attempted to transcend the binary altogether through a rehumanization of
the self—the origins of this position could be found within earlier nationalist projects of internal
reform (Tibi 1997: 84; Hourani 1962: 193; Jankowski 1991: 244-245) Egyptian revolutionaries
thus attempted to obtain legitimacy before global audiences through such techniques of
resistance, especially foreign governments which publicly espoused liberal principles of selfdetermination. In this regard, the portrayal of a racialized and gendered self as being peaceful
was equated with the capacity to self-govern, the attainment of civilizational maturity, and the
ability to maintain the order necessary for exercising political independence.
The Contentious Spring of 1919
Since the Urabi revolt in 1882, the anticolonial revolution of 1919-1922 marked the first
time that Egyptians formed a national movement which transcended class, gender, sectarian, and
even political differences. A number of observers at the time called the revolution an instance of
a “new religion” given its unprecedented display of interfaith solidarity between Muslims and
Christian Copts in street politics (Pollard 2005: 166). The episode was particularly significant in
that elements of revolutionary subjectivity in Egypt which resonate until the present day were
fully expressed for the first time at this critical historical juncture: a civic repertoire of
contention, an ensemble of particular resistance practices which included demonstrations, strikes,
boycotts, petition-writing, and street theater had emerged during the prior four decades of
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struggle between the nationalist movement and the British occupation authorities, was widely
used for the first time at a national scale. Members of the effendiyya middle class such as
students, lawyers, civil service employees, and merchants joined manual laborers as they
marched side by side and commenced strikes which shut down the central government,
communication, and transportation lines throughout the country for months. The language of the
revolution itself was expressed in the terms of secular nationalism, a dynamic that was more
inclusive of the Christian Coptic minority and women activists than before. Finally, and as
mentioned in the introduction, women from all classes entered contentious politics for the first
time and played critical roles in popular mobilization against the colonial regime. Upper-class
veiled women broke with the Ottoman traditions of harem seclusion to join subaltern women to
peacefully protest, traverse the barricades set up by British soldiers, and stood outside various
governmental offices, encouraging men to continue their strikes and boycotts of British goods. In
fact, it was the Wafd’s women’s committee which was led by Huda Sha’arawi which eventually
led to a curtailing in the full face veil as a popular tradition, and enabled women to later take on
more public roles in the country’s politics as a feminist movement was born during the interwar
period (Gordon 2010: 373).
Another significant aspect of the episode is that certain contentious performances were
innovated which remain in use today, especially acts which symbolically depicted interfaith
solidarity between Muslim and Coptic protesters. Despite the outcome of partial rather than full
independence being granted to Egypt, the revolution was understood collectively as a
performativity of the self, an embodied form of knowledge and subjectivity that was processoriented: the uprising became an event that was central not only to Egyptian nationalist identity
formation, but was treasured as a collective memory in the cultural revolutionary repertoire that
would be mobilized later in 1952 and 2011 (Sabaseviciute 2011, Mayer 1988, Goldschmidt,
Johnson, and Salmoni 2005). As Gordon writes, “The ‘revolution’ would be recalled in memoirs
and fiction as the mobilization of the entire nation…Muslim, Christian, and Jewish clerics spoke
to mixed congregations in each other’s houses of worship. Crescent and cross fused into a shared
symbol and the oration of the late nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil—‘my country, you have my
love and devotion’—set to music by popular composer Sayyid Darwish became the national
anthem” (Gordon 2010: 372-373). Huda Sha’rawi, who later organized protests herself,
described the onset of demonstrations as “sparks flying from the mouth of a boiling volcano
waiting to erupt…Anyone who saw this sweeping revolution spreading in a way that revealed the
depth and force of its fire could tell it was a fire that could not be contained…The revolution
manifested itself the same everywhere because there was only one way to act and that was to
revolt” (Sha’rawi quoted in Badran 1995: 75).
The causes of the contentious episode rested in the particular postwar circumstances
which engendered political turbulence in the country and within the broader imperial order.
Egyptian nationalists felt they were given short shrift in postwar negotiations, a sentiment that
was supported by the fact that the delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference invited less
populated (and of course less geopolitically strategic) nations to the conference to present their
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case for territorial independence. Sa’d Zaghlul, a former member of the Legislative Assembly,
invited colleagues who possessed a history of supporting parliamentary rule and
constitutionalism to his country residence. The founders of the Wafd Party (which is translated
as the “delegation party” or “delegation” for short) were predominantly landowners, attorneys,
intellectuals and reformers from the middle and upper classes. One reason the Wafd’s leadership
was ideologically committed to nonviolence was due in part to their class status; they were wary
of unfettered disorder if collective violence ensued and sought to avoid this mode of agitating for
national independence. One reason the Wafd successfully mobilized support prior to and during
the revolution was that it actively recruited members from the Hizb al-Watani and Hizb al-Umma
nationalist parties. The Hizb al-Umma (The Umma Party) itself was known for its moderate
ideological stance. As Marius Deeb claims, the Wafd “borrowed the methods and had the urban
support of the former, and borrowed the ideology and had the rural support of the latter” (Deeb
1979: 3, 40).
One factor which united both parties despite their different ideological orientations
concerned the class status of their leadership, an issue that would directly affect the trajectory of
revolutionary politics. The three parties drew their core base of recruits primarily from the new
effendiyya middle class which emerged from the families of modest landowners who benefited
from new forms of commercialized agriculture. Their children formed the first generation which
received a Westernized secular education, and were later employed in white collar professions as
opposed to the predominantly manual labor of the subaltern classes (Jacob 2011: 4, Ryzova
2014).
On November 12, 1918, three of the Wafd founders, Sa’d Zaghlul, Ali Sha’arawi, and
Abdel Aziz Fahmi visited the British Residency, requesting permission to visit London to plead
the case for Egypt’s independence before Parliament. They added the caveat that the British
could continue to supervise both the Suez Canal and the public debt as part of their demands.
The request was summarily refused. Recognizing that a bilateral approach would likely fail, the
Wafd leadership submitted an exhaustive memorandum to the plenipotentiaries at Versailles. The
document first outlined the civilizational progress achieved by Egypt as it experienced
modernity, a sentiment that was captured by the ex-Khedive Ismail’s famous quote, “Egypt was
no longer in Africa, but was a part of Europe” (Chirol 1920: 144).
The document proceeded to reiterate the fact that Britain assured the Egyptian
government that the occupation was temporary, and delineated the services Egypt provided to
Great Britain and the Allies during the war, claiming that the Protectorate which Britain
unilaterally declared in 1914 was concluded without the consent of the Egyptian people. After
listing such grievances, the memorandum protested Britain’s refusal to allow Egyptians to
represent themselves in Versailles, and listed the Wafd’s demands which included “the
recognition and free enjoyment of national independence and of Egypt’s full and sole
sovereignty over the Sudan as well as over Egypt proper. In return, it promised ample security
for the discharge of Egypt’s financial obligations and for the rights enjoyed by the foreign
communities settled in the country” (Ibid).
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Despite their refusal to accede to such demands, the British authorities failed to forestall
the Wafd’s subsequent activism. Shortly after the party (simultaneously functioning as a
movement) was founded, Lord Curzon, the acting Foreign Minister, claimed before Parliament
that Zaghlul was not widely supported given that civil servants, judges, the police, and the army
had not signed a popular mandate. The denial of the Wafd’s representative character provoked
the Tawkilat campaign, which involved the collection of signatures by members of the
Legislative Assembly, councils in the provinces and various municipalities, notables,
professionals, and representatives of all social classes who endorsed Zaghlul and the other
founders as speakers for the nation. The tawkilat were distributed throughout the country during
the four months preceding the revolution, and were signed by members of all classes: the
signatures numbered in the hundreds of thousands and seemed like a “silent rehearsal for the
1919 popular uprising” (Deeb 1979: 40). As Amine Youssef recalls in his memoirs, “As a result
of this statement, which was reproduced in Egypt, the officers and government officials all over
the country signed a mandate. Had it not been for this statement of Lord Curzon’s, Zaghlul
would not have secured the immense number of signatures that he did from nearly the whole of
the civil service” (Youssef 1940: 65). As a former civil servant, Youssef assisted with this effort
by collecting signatures for the mandate from government officials in Mansoura, Tanta, Zagazig,
Port Said, and Damietta.
The Wafd’s executive committee braced for a potential backlash from the authorities. In
the situation that some of its founders were arrested, the committee chose members to replace
others if they were detained (Ibid: 65). In her memoirs, Huda Sha’rawi recalled that her husband
‘Ali Sha’rawi kept her informed of developments among the Wafd’s inner circle in case he,
Zaghlul and others were arrested. The expectation was that the Wafd’s women leaders would
continue the revolution, an event which actually transpired, and is discussed in further detail in
the next section. According to Sha’rawi’s account of events, the British authorities were growing
increasingly alarmed at nationalist agitation and attempted to pressure the Wafd’s leaders to
forestall the strikes that were planned. British officials subsequently summoned them, which led
the activists to quickly assemble at Sha’rawi’s residence before the meeting. Huda relates that
the meeting offered the first hint that the women assembled would take over certain roles, “My
husband gave me an envelope saying, ‘If we are arrested, please give the money to the wife of
Sa’d Pasha. She may need it in our absence.’ From the window I watched him and the others
leave, some with grim smiles and others with heads bent.” (Sha’rawi 1986: 119). On March 9th
1919, after receiving prior warnings which called for the organization to desist its mobilization
efforts, Sa’d Zaghlul and three other Wafd leaders were arrested and deported to Malta. A few
days later, demonstrations, strikes and protests erupted throughout the country.
Sir Valentine Chirol, a journalist for The Times in Egypt from October 1919 to April
1920 witnessed such events unfolding firsthand. As he reported, he noted that the news of Sa’d
Zaghlul’s arrest and subsequent deportation to Malta spread like wildfire through Cairo by that
evening. In the morning, the students from Al-Azhar University began their strikes and
demonstrations first, followed by others from the schools of law, commerce, engineering, and
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medicine. Crowds began to assemble in front of the railway station, hoping to catch sight of the
Wafd leaders before their departure from the country. Upon discovering that the four were
already en route to Alexandria, they dispersed into several groups near other schools and
government offices as protests began to spread throughout central Cairo (Chirol 1920: 177-178).
The student demonstrators marched to the Qasr al-Aini hospital and the School of Medicine,
exhorting other students and bystanders to join them. On March 10th, the students rekindled their
protest after the police dispersed them the day earlier. A general strike was called by the AlAzhar students, and this time, the police forces found themselves overwhelmed. As the protests
swelled, General Watson called in the regular army in order to set up picket-lines with machine
guns at crucial street intersections (MacIntyre 1985: 27-28).
That same day, other crowds ventured over to the area known as European Cairo and
began to smash street lamps and tramway cars on Mohammed Ali Street. By the morning of the
10th, protesters headed to Qasr el-Nil, a street located next to the area that would later be called
Tahrir Square (Liberation Square) for the first time during the revolution, where certain shops
were sacked along with the office of the Syrian newspaper Al-Moqattam (Chirol 1920: 178). The
tramway cars, which were viewed as a symbol of privilege given that Europeans were more
likely to afford such travel, were systematically stoned (Beinin 1981, Beinin and Lockman 1988,
Goldberg 1992). At first, the police tried to suppress such actions, but soon found themselves
overwhelmed by the sheer number of demonstrators and decided to call in the military. Although
the military and the police included a number of Egyptian officers, the British previously limited
the number of Egyptians in the military to avoid a potential coup (Cole 1999).
On March 11th, lawyers from the Egyptian Native Courts started their strike, and were
joined by clerks from the ministries of Education and Public Works. The next day, the
demonstrations and strikes spread to Tanta where 3,000 protesters attempted to storm a railway
station. The British soldiers that were stationed there fired into the crowd, killing eleven and
wounding fifty-one individuals. By the 18th, other provinces throughout Egypt including Behera,
Gharbia, Munufia, and Daqhalia were in full revolt, and all the telegraph and telephone lines
north of Cairo were cut. In Qalyub, crowds repeated the contentious performance deployed
elsewhere of storming railway stations and either cutting or pulling up the tracks to jeopardize
transportation efforts. A few stations were torched by the swelling crowds, and a number of
trains which ran along the Nile were seized (MacIntyre 1985: 28-30).
Power as expressed by a relation between two or more social sites influences the spatial
politics of contention: regime challengers often target or reappropriate public spaces that are
symbolically and materially associated with the functioning of a power apparatus (Sewell 2001,
Tripp 2013). The location of actors and their practices within a given social network affects the
type of revolutionary subjectivity which is expressed. Whether revolutionaries belonged to the
urban upper classes, or whether they were peasants in the countryside meant that their interaction
with local instantiations of power affected their forms of claim-making, both prior to and during
the episode in question. In 1919, even though some demonstrators deliberately sought to portray
themselves as nonviolent, others engaged in contentious performances such as torching police
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stations, cutting telegraph lines and damaging railroad tracks. Peasants in rural areas, including
subaltern men and women, attacked local railway, communication and transport lines
systematically. Ellis Goldberg (1992) argues that one way to understand how and why residents
in the provinces and rural areas consistently attacked telegraph and railway lines was directly
related to the policies enacted by British authorities during the war.
In the rural provinces and smaller towns as opposed to larger urban centers like Cairo and
Alexandria, a Cotton Control Commission was established which purchased the entire cotton
crop in order to export it at reduced prices, and a Supplies Control Board set prices for foodstuffs
such as cereals. Inflation was rampant during the war, and peasants frequently attempted to
conceal precious supplies, rather than see them requisitioned to urban areas to be sold at
exorbitant prices. Sometimes, peasants were forced to labor on transport and communication
lines when volunteers during the war fell short (Goldberg 1992: 262-263). As Avner Offer
concludes:
The first World War is often depicted as a great industrial war, fought by industrial
methods. In fact, given a strong industrial capability on both sides, primary
commodities were more decisive: food, industrial raw materials, and that most primary
of all commodities, people. Germany did not run out of rifles or shells. It suffered badly
from shortages of food. Likewise the Allies: their agrarian resources decided the war.
So not only a war of steel and gold, but a war of bread and potatoes (Offer 1989: 1).
Local spaces of course are embedded within global hierarchical structures and
intersocietal social relations. A few years earlier, wheat production globally dropped below
prewar levels. Great Britain and other Western governments unexpectedly found that they were
cut off from regular sources of supply in Romania, Russia, and even India, which caused a
shortfall of 600 million bushels. To compensate, the British authorities relied heavily on Egypt
for such commodities, increasing wheat exports from the level of 136,000 bushels to 1.8 million
in 1915. The export of maize increased from 180,000 during the prewar years to 1.5 million
bushels in 1915 and 5 million in 1916 respectively. Wheat shortages were due to a decline in
production and a surge in exports to global markets, especially to the colonial metropole. The
British army requisitioned other raw supplies for use in the war such as livestock, which led to
local peasants attempting to conceal their holdings from the authorities (Goldberg 1992: 264265, 268). One of the Foreign Office documents Goldberg consulted suggests the significance of
price fixation and the forced exportation of wheat and maize: “The Cairene laborers' diet was
very high in grain. Of total consumption, 72.5 kilograms out of 88.71 kilograms were in wheat,
maize, or bread for the better-off Cairene laborers. By December 1917 these accounted for over
65 percent of the food budget (up from 48% in February 1914) (Ibid: 278).
Consequently, during the revolution, peasants not only used a “weapon of the weak”
(Scott 2008) of concealing precious supplies, but attacked the social sites that were previously
involved in the forced requisition of precious foodstuffs and commodities. Their claim-making
targeted the sites of power they encountered in their everyday lives: aside from steamboats along
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the Nile, the railroads were key in the transportation of precious commodities to urban centers
for exportation abroad. Cutting the railroad and telegraph lines was a retaliatory act, but also
rendered it more difficult for the central government to send British troops to suppress local
protests. In response, British soldiers resorted to firebombing insurgent villages (Fernea and
Bezirgan 1977: 196-197). Popular grievances in the countryside were expressed in the following
poem, titled “Bardun ya Wingate” (Excuse us, O, Wingate), which was directed at Sir Reginald
Wingate, the High Commissioner in Egypt, in 1919:
Pardon us, Wingate! But our country has had enough! You took our camels,
donkeys, barley, and wheat aplenty. Now leave us alone! Laborers and soldiers
were forced to travel, leaving their land. They headed to Mount Lebanon and
to the battlefields and the trenches! And now they blame us? Behold all the
calamities you caused! Had it not been for our laborers, you (and your rifles)
would have been helpless in the desert sand! You who are in authority!
Why didn’t you go all alone to the Dardanelles? Maxwell! Now you feel
some hardships. So why don’t you drink it up!...
O Wilson, we have gathered together but to whom shall we address ourselves?...
We want it to be known—total independence is our goal! If only “they” leave our nation!
We would surpass Japan in civilization. Return to your country! Pick up your belongings!
What audacity and rudeness. You are a true calamity! Do you have to stick to us like
glue? (Fahmy 2011: 134).
By mid-March, the situation was escalating quickly: additional demonstrations spread
from Cairo and Alexandria to villages and towns in the Delta region, including Tanta and
Damanhur. The British authorities claimed, “Reports from the provinces show trouble at
Damietta and demonstrations at Mansura and attempts are being made to interrupt
communications. Telegraph lines have been cut in several places, apparently with a view to
isolating Cairo and railway lines from Tanta to Menouf” (Fahmy 2011: 138). A hard-line
approach was initially used as a retributive tactic and included the collective punishment of
entire villages, especially those closest to the damaged tracks, through aerial bombardment,
machine guns, and bombs against civilians. Sir Ronald Graham instructed the Foreign Office to
censor such news, “I would advise that any communiques from Egypt dealing with the burning
of villages etc., should be carefully censored before publication, otherwise questions in
Parliament are almost certain to arise” (Ibid: 139).
Despite such tactics, the unrest continued and by the 16th, Cairo was effectively cut off
from the rest of the country: no railway, telephone, or telegraph services between the city and
other provinces were available. By the 18th and the 19th of March, nearly all of the railway
stations were burnt, and lawyers, laborers, street laypersons, peasants, students, and even
bedouins were all protesting throughout the country simultaneously (MacIntyre 1985: 28-30).
11
The successful diffusion of the strike as a contentious performance became apparent during the
course of the episode. British aerial bombardment in villages produced the opposite effect than
expected: Egyptians in the cities felt incensed by news of such violence, and upped the ante.
From March 13 to April 15, the Cairo tramway workers launched their strike. Two days later
they were joined by 4,000 workers for the railway depot who struck on March 15, and on March
18, employees at the Royal Printing Press walked out. It was on March 16 that Alexandrian
workers diffused both strikes and demonstrations to the railways, sea ports, lighthouses, the post
office, government workshops, the customs authority, and finally, the tramways. In terms of
aggregate estimates, from August to November 1919, there were 24 strikes total including a 65
day walkout by railway employees. During the months of December 1919 to 1921, there were 81
strikes, including 67 that applied to entire industries, and from July 1921 until March 1922, 81
strikes occurred in 50 different enterprises, which included a 113 day strike by Suez Oil Refinery
employees, 102 day strike at the Cairo Tramway, a 52 day strike at al-Ahaliyah Spinning and
Weaving Company, and a 45 day strike at the Cairo Gas Company. In fact, the number of unions
during those nine months doubled to 95 mainly in Cairo and Alexandria (Beinin 1981: 19-20).
Recognizing that the hard-line approach was ineffective, the British freed Zaghlul and his
colleagues from their detainment in Malta, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Egyptians
cheering on the streets, vowing to continue their efforts until total independence was achieved.
William T. Ellis (1919), a correspondent for the Washington Post, describes how protesters and
strikers reacted when they heard the news:
I saw America’s armistice celebrations in Philadelphia and Boston…America’s peace
carnivals, however, were as Sunday school exercises when compared with the mad
delirium of patriotic fervor that swept Cairo into the streets for two days of oration on
the proclamation of Gen. Allenby freeing the nationalist leaders exiled in Malta…
Occasionally the one chorus was varied by cheers for America and for Mr. Wilson and
for France and for Saad Zaghlul and for the peace conference. Mostly, though, it was
tirelessly, “Yahia el Watan! Yahia el Watan!” (Long live the nation!). The frenzy
grew with the crowds…Anybody could see that this was a festival of joy, with
animosity to nobody. There were no parties or classes in this freedom carnival. Egypt
was indulging in a joyous and innocent orgy of national consciousness. The slums
sent their worst and the palaces sent their best to mingle in a common and tumultuous street
filling procession of patriotism, which kept up an overpowering and unbelievable din.
Ellis’ term “freedom carnival” appeared to be rather fit for the occasion. Abd al-Rahman
Fahmi described how upper-class women “paraded in their cars, waving flags, and throwing
flowers” while the “lower class women (‘ammat al-nisa’) were not to be outdone as they rode on
the back of trucks (and donkey-drawn carriages) and proceeded to dance and chant to the rhythm
of drums of trumpets” (Fahmi quoted in Fahmy 2011: 140). Egyptian men danced and sung too
according to Ellis who reminded his readers that such performances were “non-vulgar”: “The
social standing of these women is represented by a minus sign rather than a zero: yet they rode
unrebuked side by side with the elegant automobiles of the veiled daughters and wives from the
12
harems of the princes and pashas and beys. Egypt was never before as democratic as on this day
of days: the fiesta was a cross section of the nation’s life. From royalty to fellaheen and Bedouin,
all clamorous with ‘Yahia el Watan’ (Long live the nation)” (Ellis 1919).
On April 8, 1919, a larger and more organized demonstration took place which was filled
with musicians playing nationalist tunes, coupled with bystanders carrying Egyptian flags. What
was particularly interesting about this demonstration is that students carried flags with bore the
cross and the crescent together, a symbol that was commonly used during the revolution. One
eyewitness observed an “Azhari Sheikh was seen carrying a picture of the Coptic Christian
patriarch along with a flag depicting the cross and the crescent, while changing: ‘Long live our
holy union’ and the gathering crowd enthusiastically repeated his chant” (Fahmy 2011: 141). For
their part, British officials claimed that Jewish Egyptians took an active role in the celebrations
and protests: “A noticeable feature of this afternoon’s procession which I myself saw was two
carriages full of Jews, amongst whom, was one of the chief Rabbis…They were carrying the
Jewish Flag (i.e. a flag with the Star of David) attached to the Egyptian Flag and the Rabbi made
several speeches which were loudly cheered” (Ibid).
The arts of resistance thrived on this occasion, and numerous Egyptians created songs
and poetry to commemorate Zaghlul. To avoid censorship, activists creatively devised ways of
praising the Wafd leadership such as singing about zaghlul dates (balah zaghlul). In his vivid
study of revolutionary street politics, Ziad Fahmy documented numerous songs and poems that
were frequently chanted during the demonstrations and at the myriad coffeeshops in Cairo. One
of these songs was written by Na’ima al-Misriyya:
O zaghlul dates, how pretty they are.
O those dates, those zaghlul dates.
God bless, how sugary and sweet. Lord almighty—zaghlul dates!
I call out to you in all the valleys.
I yearn for and need—zaghlul dates!
You’re my country’s produce. I envy my own happiness (Sa’di)—zaghlul dates!
O soul of your country, why the long separation?
Return and take care of your children—zaghlul dates! (Ibid: 162).
Munira al-Mahdiyya decided that zaghlul pigeons were worth yearning for as well:
The pigeons were lifted and placed down again from Egypt to the Sudan.
It’s a zaghlul (pigeon) and my heart aches for it.
I call on it when I need it. You can understand its language if you attend to it.
It says hamayham ya hamam.
My passion for those zaghalil is an obsession and loving them is my destiny (Ibid: 163).
As Fahmy notes, during the months of March-April 1919, the arts in the form of songs,
dances, street theatre, and poems, combined with literary materials such as pamphlets, circulars,
13
and speeches enabled a counter-discourse to emerge, “The streets, and by extension the public
squares, cafes, bars, mosques, and churches became the necessary carnivalesque spaces outside
the reach of the central authorities where illicit counterhegemonic opinions were debated and
exchanged. Even al-Azhar University transformed temporarily into a secular, gender-neutral,
socially egalitarian space of open counterhegemonic subversion” (Ibid: 165). Other
revolutionaries used similar performances and social spaces once it became apparent that such
actions greatly resonated with other protesters. Ahmad Amin, a judge who was a close
acquaintance of Zaghlul, described Cairo’s Judicial School as “boiling over at these events, and
more so when the Wafd was formed and headed by Zaghlul. The school considered itself his
creature, and felt that both nationalism and loyalty required it to support him as far as possible”
(Amin 1978: 131). Given Amin’s connections with professional syndicates, associations which
historically served as an effective mobilization network in Egypt, he was allocated certain tasks
by Abd al-Rahman Fahmi, the Wafd secretary. It is worth quoting his account in detail:
He (Fahmi) chose me to supervise two jobs: the first was the delivery of political speeches
in mosques following the Friday noon prayer, so I used to meet with some colleagues and
organize with them the delivery of these speeches and distribute them to the mosques after
having designated with them the topic of their speeches; the second job was the writing of
leaflets on the most important events… At any rate, I immersed myself in politics and took part
in demonstrations, especially those that had in view the rapprochement between Copts and
Muslims. I used to seek a demonstration, climb into a carriage wearing my turban, accompany
in it a priest wearing his clerical cassock, and carry with him a flag bearing the cross and the
crescent. And I did other similar deeds” (Amin 1978: 132-133).
It was apparent that the Wafd sought to successfully mobilize the Coptic population in
order to delegitimize British claims to protect religious minorities as part of their imperial
occupation. The movement’s literature discursively represented the nation as encompassing “the
unity of the crescent and the cross.” At one point when Sa’d Zaghlul was able to return to the
country in April 1919 from exile, he was approached by Coptic leaders who asked him what role,
if any, he expected their community to play in the national movement. He swiftly answered,
“The Copts are like the Muslims. They have the same rights and duties. All Egyptians are the
same.” The Wafd also adopted a popular secular slogan which “declared that religion was for
God, but the homeland (al-watan) was for all” (Hatem 2000: 35-36).
As with any contentious episode, there are debates regarding the degree to which such
performances are spontaneous, versus being organized through pre-existing social networks
(Gunning and Baron 2014). The uprising was to some degree both spontaneous and coordinated.
On the one hand, the Wafd leadership itself did not organize most of the protests which occurred,
and hence were able to distance themselves if sporadic outbursts of violence occurred. In fact,
the Wafd leadership viewed themselves as being committed to nonviolent resistance, and did not
expect, nor did they desire, the population to become radicalized (Botman 1991: 28). Preexisting social networks were created by the mobility of village notables and the effendiyya, or
14
large landowners. The effendiyya and their children obtained their education in the cities, and
subsequently returned home to their villages to manage their land holdings and other property.
The Wafd operated in part through its relationships with village headmen or umdas, who
encouraged the peasants in their jurisdiction to support the movement (Botman 1991: 28, 56).
This traffic enabled the 1919 popular uprising to be possible given that the effendiyya not
only supported the central Wafd leadership in Cairo, but also established branches of the
movement at the local level. The nationalist local committees which organized some collective
actions (though not all) were typically comprised of effendi representatives and village notables.
In one case, an eyewitness in Beni Suaif reported that the effendis and students of Al-Azhar
whose extended families resided in the area led the local demonstrators while the peasants
(fellaheen) followed as supporters. In another case, Yusuf al-Jindi formed a revolutionary
council in Gharbiya which included merchants, educated effendis, and notables, and proclaimed
the town’s independence, a move that was replicated in other cities during the revolution. A
parallel move occurred in Aswan’s national council which was structured in the same way.
According to Deeb, “Local leaders, in most of the cases, were products of the local uprisings
rather than their instigators. Perhaps there was an element of truth in the view that emissaries
from other districts, and particularly of Cairo, though with no planned aims, helped the local
committees, for instance in the Asyut province to ‘fan the flame,’ and organize the masses”
(Deeb 1979: 45).
Although prior organization was involved, especially in terms of constructing
mobilization networks, the breakout of demonstrations and their utter scope still surprised the
members of the Wafd. Some of the leaders feared whether they could actually control the
direction of the uprising. Even though leaders and laypersons sought to portray national unity,
there was still a discrepancy of views between the Wafdist leadership and some of the
demonstrators. To try and self-discipline the protests and maintain a certain semblance of order,
the Wafd’s central branch issued a manifesto which was signed by the remaining ten founders,
notables, and religious dignitaries, and stated that “to cut off transport harmed the people…and
could stop the transport of crops and hamper commercial transactions” (Ibid: 44). This statement
illustrates not only that the Wafd’s actions where shaped by the economic interests of the middle
and upper classes, but also reflected their concern with events spiraling out of control. Even
though nationalist parties and the country’s elite played a role in spreading discourses and
diffusing certain performances, they did not organize most of the gatherings which transpired
during the revolution, despite the fact that most instigators of contention informally supported
the central leadership (Beinin 1981).
As mentioned earlier, the location of actors and their practices within a given social
network affects the type of revolutionary subjectivity which is expressed. As will be discussed in
the next section, a gendered analysis enables analysts to not only evaluate the above dimensions
of the revolution, but to also discern how and why certain actors, namely the Wafdist elite,
portrayed themselves as being nonviolent in order to obtain legitimacy for their movement
domestically and globally, whereas other protesters diverged from this narrative and the Wafd’s
15
attempt to self-discipline their contentious politics. Egyptian women engaged in protests
beginning in March 1919, when the demonstrations and strikes diffused throughout the country.
Their role eventually became critical in the course of events which led to the awarding of partial
independence to Egypt in 1922. As men were arrested, including the leaders of the Wafd itself,
women beyond the nationalist women’s committee stepped in to take the place of their relatives
in leading protests, boycotts, strikes, petition-writing to foreign consulates, and led economic
boycotts as well as picket lines (Marsot 1978: 269).
Women and the 1919 Revolution
Huda Sha’rawi recalls in her memoirs that the normal social conventions which called for
segregation by sex and class momentarily broke down as former harem women stood outside
each main government office, exhorting the male employees to not recommence work despite
pressure from the British authorities, “Women took off their jewelry and offered it to
government workers with the plea, ‘If you want money take this but do not hinder our cause by
going back to work under British threat” (Sha’rawi 1986: 120). Even though some civil service
employees returned to their positions, she added, “I was sad, yet I could excuse it to some extent
since the men had been without salaries, for most their sole income, for a long time…However,
even personal hardship did not prevent more acts of revolt and strikes on the part of all classes”
(Ibid).
Under martial law, the British prohibited the distribution of nationalist pamphlets.
Women like Hidiya Hanim Barakat managed to circumvent soldiers and intelligence officers by
placing clandestine pamphlets in her shopping baskets, embarked on trains throughout Upper
Egypt when the railway lines were restored, and distributed the baskets to schoolteachers posted
at each station. The British soldiers who surveyed each train never suspected that the demure
figure cloaked in an Islamic veil successfully spread revolutionary propaganda. In another
instance, Hidaya took notice that an Egyptian retailer was selling British products. Upon seeing
two Egyptians venturing into the store, she pursued the customers and sharply reprimanded them
for breaking the economic boycott (Marsot 1978: 271).
Despite British attempts to clamp down on nationalist publications, women attempted to
keep Sa’d’s cause alive through an ingenious method: on a daily basis, they would bring small
notes of money from their homes to Safiyya Zaghlul’s house, where they spent hours writing
“Yahya Sa’ad” (Long live Sa’ad Zaghlul) on every bit of paper money they could find. The
money was then placed into circulation, and “Yahya Sa’ad” became a national chant. The
women also sent several memos and petitions to the British, and one of the most important was
again sent to Lord Allenby by Sha’arawi, who became famous due to her coordination of
demonstrations and her petitions to the authorities (Fernea and Bezirgan 1977: 197).
Popular slogans among women revolutionaries were painted across banners which bore
the cross and the crescent together and read, “We protest the shedding of the blood of the
16
innocent and the unarmed.” Part of the women’s reclamation of their subjecthood involved
performances which demonstrated that their emancipation was their own, despite their depictions
within colonial discourse as passive objects in need of external liberation. To vividly express
their ability to emancipate themselves, the women frequently signed the petitions with the terms,
“In the name of the women of Egypt,” “The Ladies of Egypt,” “The mothers, sisters, and wives
of the victims massacred for the satisfaction of British ambitions,” and even as “The Mothers of
the Nation” (Ramdani 2013: 48-49).
Decades of debates concerning the status and rights of women prepared the ground for
such mobilization, yet the utter necessity of the situation created by the authorities’ repression
against male activists finally enabled women to enter public politics through popular contention
(Baron 1997). Historically, as mentioned, women from the subaltern classes protested oppressive
state practices, but 1919 signified the crucial moment when their middle and upper-class veiled
sisters took an active role in public politics (Tucker 1985). Women activists frequently wrote and
distributed pamphlets and other anti-colonial literature, and attempted to redefine revolutionary
discourse on their own terms. However, as later Egyptian feminists like Nawal al-Saadawi
observed, certain types of revolutionary subjectivity were promoted and recognized over others,
even amongst women. While the protests of middle and upper-class women have been widely
documented, even in the nationalist historiography produced decades later, the contributions of
subaltern women have been marginalized in the literature. Whereas the former group effectively
led and coordinated collective actions, it was the latter group who were frequently killed as
British soldiers clamped down on protests. Al-Sa’adawi once wrote that “little has been said
about the masses of poor women who rushed into the national struggle without counting the cost,
and who lost their lives, whereas the lesser contributions of aristocratic women leaders have been
noisily acclaimed and brought to the forefront” (Al-Sa’adawi 1980: 176).
The social historian Ijlal Khalifa seconded this notion, “It is said that the daughter of the
wealthy or aristocratic class is the one who participated in the revolution and the adept political
work after it, and that the daughter of the middle and lower classes is the one who died as a
martyr by the hand of colonialism, who felt its humiliation and oppression.” As Khalifa
observes, peasant women often protested alongside men, and were frequently involved in
transgressive contention more than elite women. Subaltern women were more likely to destroy
and sabotage railway and telegraph lines, especially in provincial towns and villages, acts which
were responded to with greater attendant violence by the military. Interestingly enough, there
was more sex segregation present in middle and upper-class protests where women frequently
demonstrated separately from men, whereas the lines were blurred when the lower classes
participated in demonstrations. Another explanation is that many subaltern women resided in
provincial towns and the countryside given the spatial location of certain industries, and these
were areas where British soldiers resorted to collectively punishing entire villages through
airstrikes for their insurgent activities. By contrast, the famed upper and middle class
demonstrations primarily took place in Cairo, and were met with a far less violent confrontation.
(Khalifa 1973). This study is admittedly limited in its predominant focus on the urban
17
demonstrations in Cairo given that the available literature and reporting for the time covered
those protests in greater detail. Where applicable, the contributions of women from a variety of
social classes will be addressed (This needs further research and development).
On March 11th, the affiliates of Sa’d Zaghlul called at his house given that it had served
for months as the headquarters for the “Party of Independence.” When they arrived at the
residence, his wife, Safiyya received them, and delivered a stirring speech, claiming that the
space was now “the House of the Nation” (Bayt al-umma). Safiyya’s innovation caught on and
the residence became a key site where demonstrators assembled and other revolutionary
activities such as petition-writing were organized. The house usually received groups of lawyers,
students, notables, and other officials, leading revolutionaries to affectionately call her “the
Mother of all Egyptians,” or Umm al-Masriyeen (Hatem 2000: 39). As Hatem notes: “The
description of Zaghul’s role as that of a ‘mother’ underlined a socially acceptable way of
interpreting her actions. Instead of maintaining the political cohesion of the party and the
national struggle, she was seen as nurturing the revolution. This characterization elevated the
private and socially familiar role of caretaker, accepted by men and women of different classes,
to new political heights” (Ibid).
Safiyya herself had lived a life of seclusion in adherence to Ottoman practices for the
elite, but enthusiastically departed from tradition as she became a public figure for the first time.
She met delegations who paid their respects to Sa’d as a symbolic gesture in his absence, signed
the petitions of protesters, and delivered speeches to rally Wafd supporters. She was an adept
political operator and recognized the potency of the symbol of a veiled woman openly stating the
nation’s readiness for independence, an act that itself delegitimized British claims to emancipate
women (Badran 1988, Pollard 2009). In one instance, after a violent exchange between British
soldiers and protesters left one of the latter wounded, the crowd brought him to the Zaghlul
residence. The young man lamented, “I am going to die far away from my mother.” She
responded with, “My son, am I not also your mother?” He responded, “Yes, but you are also the
mother of all Egyptians.” In another case, a group of women protesters from Tanta chanted at the
entrance to her house, “Aisha (the Prophet Muhammad’s wife) was the Mother of the Believers
(Umm al-Mu’minin); Safiyya is the Mother of the Egyptians (Umm al-Masriyeen)” (Baron 2005:
141). Safiyya’s symbolic role was born amidst contingency and popular unrest. In Arabic, the
term umm is often used when mothers take their son’s names such as Umm Ahmad or Umm
Muhammad, a very common practice throughout the Middle East. In this regard, Safiyya’s
attributed titles indicated that Egyptians not only adopted her as a maternal leader, but also that
they signified their loyalty to her and the Wafd. She continued to embrace the role given that it
was politically effective. The Sultan who was installed by the British later recognized “the
extraordinary influence of the women and particularly of Mme. Saad Zaghlul in exciting native
hostility to the British” (Ibid).
Safiyya on numerous occasions used this role to self-discipline protesters in order to
avoid events spiraling out of control, and arguably to protect the class hierarchy. In one instance,
when the protesters assembled appeared to be increasingly disgruntled, she called for her
18
“devoted sons” to recall their brotherly ties to each other, and to restrain themselves from
violence in order to “protect our guests, and their houses and property” (Ibid: 143). Given that
the Wafd leaders were imprisoned during much of the episode, and the press was forbidden to
print the movement’s materials under martial law, Safiyya articulated Sa’d’s positions informally
and through speeches. British officials in turn, recognized her symbolic role and decided to
monitor the House of the Nation from a distance. The Cairo City Police were instructed to ensure
that she was “carefully watched” at all times. As Baron argues, the class and gender hierarchy
remained very much intact: appeals were not made to the nation’s daughters, and to some degree,
the Wafd succeeded in preventing the revolution from taking a radical social direction as
opposed to a limited political one (Ibid).
Although women’s entry into the country’s revolutionary contentious politics marked a
departure from traditional customs, at least for the middle and upper-classes, existing gender
identities and hierarchies were still reproduced within social constructions of the imagined
community. Safiyya was not viewed as an individual in her own right, but was accepted as a
mother and as a wife, and the same could be said of the other activists who formed the Wafd’s
women’s committee. Like male nationalists, women used maternal and family idioms to
characterize their revolutionary activities. The Wafd leadership as a whole also reinforced class
hierarchies by discursively portraying themselves as “mothers” and “fathers” who could provide
care and support to the protesters who would, according to them, be otherwise divided by class,
religion, and political affiliation. Beth Baron has argued that the “mothers” and “fathers”
“provided comfort, creating a sense of belonging and suggesting that the welfare of the people
was in the right hands. Yet assertions that the nation was a family were also meant to insure
obedience to its leaders and to silence dissent” (Baron 2005: 135).
Another instance where both class and gender hierarchies were reproduced is captured by
the following incident: to celebrate Zaghlul’s release, women and men organized a mass
demonstration which aimed to display national unity, and yet simultaneously reproduced extant
social divisions. Men of the upper and middle classes marched in the front, which included
Cabinet officials, members of the Legislative Assembly, the ulama, other civil service
employees, judges, doctors, and lawyers. This formation was followed by workers and male
secondary and primary school students. After their ranks, upper-class women (in a rare instance
where they did join men in a demonstration) followed in cars; finally, women from the lower
classes ended the formation in carts (Badran 1995: 77).
Revolutionaries submitted petitions to the foreign missions in Cairo, especially the
American Consul-General. Several petitions detailed complaints about the women’s treatment by
British soldiers, and according to Nabila Ramdani, confirm that the petition writers were usually
women from the effendiyya and upper classes. Several were the daughters and wives of the elite
beys and pashas. A central theme was the protesters’ concern with the methods the British
authorities used to suppress demonstrations, especially when the women claimed they had “done
nothing more than claim the liberty and independence of their country, in conformity with the
principles proclaimed by Dr. (President Woodrow) Wilson and accepted by all belligerent and
19
neutral nations.” In another petition, 118 women exhorted the international community to view
their cause as legitimate, “We beg you to send our message to America and to President Wilson
personally. Let them hear our call. We believe they will not suffer Liberty to be crushed in
Egypt, that human liberty for which your brave and noble sons have died.” The petition was
written with reference to the American revolutionary war of independence from Great Britain
(Ramdani 2013: 48-49).
During the first few weeks of the revolution, various upper and middle-class women
ventured over to Huda Sha’arawi’s house to discuss their next course of action on March 16,
1919. Sha’arawi penned a letter to the High Commissioner’s wife, Lady Burnett, due to their
personal acquaintance. It is worth quoting her letter in detail in order to tease out Sha’arawi’s
discursive position (Sha’arawi quoted in Fernea and Berzigan 1977: 195):
Dear Madam:
What do you think, Madam, of your government giving itself the right to impose curfews in a
time of peace and to banish persons who have committed no crime except to want to live freely in
their own country? What can you say about your own soldiers who roam the quiet streets of
Egypt with revolvers and machine guns, firing at unarmed people if those people’s voices are
raised to ask for justice and liberty?
Do all these deeds, Madam, result from Britain’s efforts to serve justice and humanity?
If not, I beg you to explain the real meaning of your words spoken during our conversation
together last summer. Remember, also, Madam, that if a group of young Egyptian boys throw
stones at store windows, they are only following the example set by your own ‘civilized’ soldiers
not long ago. Please, Madam, accept my heartfelt sentiments of sorrow and my personal regards.
Huda Sh’arawi
March 16, 1919
Later, more than 350 women along with Sha’arawi presented a petition at the British
High Commissioner’s office. The petition itself was signed by hundreds of women activists. It is
important to note that hundreds of petitions were sent to various consulates and embassies,
including most prominently to the US State Department and the Wilson administration (Fernea
and Berzigan 1977: 195-196). The discursive tactic of reversing the self-other gendered colonial
binary to demonstrate civilizational parity with the West, and obtain international legitimacy for
the revolution, is indicated by the tone of this petition, which was also similar to other ones
submitted to various foreign governments:
“We, the women of Egypt, mothers, sisters, and wives of those who have been the victims of
British greed and exploitation, present the following petition to Your Excellency. We deplore
the brutal, barbarous actions that have fallen upon the quiet Egyptian nation. Egypt has
committed no crime, except to express her desire for freedom and independence, according to the
20
principles enunciated by Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference and accepted by all
nations, those neutral as well as those involved in the World War.
…We ask and beseech you further to inform your government of the barbarous actions which
have been taking place in Egypt, when your soldiers have been firing on civilians, children, and
unarmed men. Why? Because these people have objected, in peaceful demonstration, to your
forbidding of Egyptians to leave the country and present their own case at the peace conference,
as other nations have done. They were also objecting, in peaceful demonstration, to the British
arrest and deportation of some of our Egyptian men to the island of Malta.
We hope, Your Excellency, that our petition, a petition from Egyptian women, will gain your
acceptance and approval so that you will then return to the support of the principles of liberty and
peace” (Ibid).
What is interesting to note about the above statement is that Egyptian women attempted
to create a distinct revolutionary identity that was expressed through two actions: the actual
contentious performance of peaceful demonstrations and a narrative portrayal of those same
actions that sought plot consistency between text and practice. The peaceful performativity of the
self is textually contrasted to the violent “barbarous actions” of the other, a reversal of the binary
which was constituted by overlapping power-knowledge networks and relations: such counterdiscourses and performances were forged in direct response to Wilsonian discourses of selfdetermination, which constrained and simultaneously enabled the claim-making of local actors.
Second, the colonial discourses which objectified Egyptian women were overturned as these
women sought to articulate their own subjectivity, discursively and in practice, which in certain
respects, reproduced gendered hierarchies of power, and yet also disrupted such social relations
through reconfiguring the contested public sphere.
Women were actively constructing themselves as synonymous with the Egyptian nation,
a nation that was deemed to be experiencing a rebirth into an age of maturity, modernity and
development. The women’s narratives and techniques of nonviolent resistance expressed a vivid
narrative, one that portrayed the Egyptian feminine self as crucial to the nation’s entry into
modernity. The Egyptian nation for them was equally feminine, mature, and developed, even if
their understandings of femininity were limited by prevailing cultural norms and the patriarchal
order. The feminine Egyptian self was portrayed through contentious performances as being
civilized, disciplined, and moral, in contrast to the perceived savagery, arbitrariness, and
immoral violence of masculine colonial forces. The fact that women wrote dozens of petitions
and submitted them to foreign consulates, and translated their banners, flags, and slogans into
French illustrates that they were acutely aware of their global audience. Huda Sha’arawi and her
peers performed a story that was diametrically opposed to the narratives of British officials
which claimed Egypt was not ready for independence, a position that was, as mentioned
previously, frequently justified in colonial discourses through reference to the issue of women’s
emancipation and familial politics. As feminists have asserted within critical IR theory debates,
21
“The personal is the political,” an adage that clarifies the character of gendered revolutionary
politics (Tickner 1997, Sylvester 2002).
One could argue that a second discursive move occurred in tandem with the first. If the
first move encompasses a strategy of reversing the colonial binary, the second sought to establish
civilizational parity with the West and the colonizer through internal reform or self-directed
“emancipation.” By contrast, this discursive position involves a movement with and toward the
other, an attempt to collapse or transcend the self-other binary by recognizing the other in the
self and vice versa (Patel 2006). The strategy’s aim was to rehumanize the conception of
selfhood, and this process was not only expressed textually in the popular press during the
closing years of the nineteenth century, but was also articulated through the narrated
performativity of the self as being orderly, moral, and nonviolent. Power of course remained ever
present as leaders sought to self-discipline such protests in order to ensure a consistent narrative
plot that would effectively legitimize the movement, its identity, and its normative project. This
attempt to show a humanized parity with the West partially explains the symbolic character of
the protests.
One vivid example which illustrates this dynamic at work is captured by the women’s
demonstration which occurred in mid-March 1919. A few events occurred which sparked the
mobilization of women protesters. On March 14, Hamidah Kamil was the first woman killed by
British soldiers in front of the Husayn Mosque in Cairo. Known as a “woman of the people”
Kamil was viewed as the first female martyr of the revolution, which triggered a popular outcry
(Badran 1995: 75).
Two days after Khalil’s death, upper-class women organized their first demonstration to
condemn the forced exile of the Wafd leaders, the perpetuation of martial law after the war, and
the arbitrary violence used against civilians. The women congregated at an activist’s residence in
Garden City, a section of Cairo that is located next to foreign embassies, consulates, and
Ismailiyya Square, which was named after the Khedive Ismail, Egypt’s ruler during the early
years of the British occupation. In fact, it was during the revolution of 1919 that the square
earned its famous name, Tahrir Square, due to the unprecedented demonstrations which took
place there, but the space was not officially renamed until 1952 under Nasser’s rule. The women
began the march with the intention of delivering petitions to the foreign consulates and
embassies which delineated their grievances under British rule and expressed their demand for
national independence. They were adorned with veils that were characteristic of the upper
class—black garments save for a thin white gauze cloth which covered their faces except for
their eyes. By contrast, subaltern and effendiyya middle class women typically covered their hair,
but not their faces, and certainly did not adhere to Ottoman customs of seclusion given the
economic necessity of supporting their families as tax farmers, merchants, traders, and day
laborers in a variety of professions. This economic division of labor therefore meant that women
from the effendiyya and subaltern classes participated in contentious politics and maintained an
active visible presence in public life, whereas the upper-class women were more socially
circumscribed in terms of access to similar spaces (Cole 1981, Tucker 1985).
22
When upper-class veiled women departed from the Ottoman practices of seclusion for the
first time as demonstrators, the act was highly symbolic and stunned other Egyptian nationalists
as well as the British authorities, who identified the protesters’ class based upon their attire. The
women proceeded to deliver petitions to the legations of The United States, France, and Italy
which stated, “Egyptian ladies—mothers, sisters, and wives of those who have fallen victim to
British designs—present to Your Excellencies this protest against the barbarous acts that the
peaceful Egyptian nation underwent for no wrong other than demanding freedom and
independence for the country based on the principles advanced by Dr. Wilson to which all
countries, belligerent, and nonbelligerent have subscribed” (Badran 1995: 76).
The women, however, decided to divert from their original course and headed in the
direction of Safiyya Zaghlul’s residence. British administrators and their intelligence services
began to closely monitor the march. As the women approached, the occupation forces became
uneasy and attempted to forestall their movement. In a petition that was submitted later listing
their grievances, the participants wrote, “When we had arrived at the end of Sa’ad Zaghlul Pasha
Street we were surrounded by British troops who levelled their weapons at us” (Ramdani 2013:
48). Sha’rawi’s statement below can be interpreted as a prime example of the second discursive
move: the attempt to collapse or transcend the binary by recognizing the self in the other. She
penned her thoughts in detail about the episode, and her account is worth quoting in full:
We women held our first demonstration on 16 March to protest the repressive acts and
intimidation practiced by the British authority. In compliance with the orders of the authority, we
announced our plans to demonstrate in advance but were refused permission. We began to
telephone each other, only to read in Al-Muqattam that the demonstration had received official
sanction. We got on the telephone again, telling as many women as possible that we would
proceed according to schedule the following morning. Had we been able to contact more than a
limited number of women, virtually all the women of Cairo would have taken part in the
demonstration.
On the morning of 16 March, I sent placards to the house of the wife of Ahmad Bey Abu
Usbaa, bearing slogans in Arabic and French painted in white on a background of black—the
colour of mourning. Some of the slogans read “Long Live the Supporters of Justice and
Freedom,” others said “Down with the Oppressors and Tyrants,” and “Down with Occupation.”
We assembled according to plan at the Garden City Park, where we left our carriages.
Having agreed upon our route and carefully instructing the young women to carry the flags
and placards in front, we set out in columns towards the legation of the United States and
intended to proceed from there to the legations of Italy and France. However, when we reached
Qasr al-Aini Street, I observed that the young women in front were deviating from the original
plan and had begun to head in the direction of Bait-al umma (The House of the Nation), as Saad
Zaghlul’s house was called…According to our first plan we were to have ended our
demonstration there. Reluctantly I went along with this change. No sooner were we approaching
Zaghlul’s house than British troops surrounded us. They blocked the streets with machine guns,
forcing us to stop along with the students who had formed columns on both sides of us.
23
I was determined the demonstration should resume. When I advanced, a British soldier stepped
toward me pointing his gun, but I made my way past him. As one of the women tried to pull me
back, I shouted in a loud voice, “Let me die so Egypt shall have an Edith Cavell” (an English
nurse shot and killed by the Germans during the First World War, who became an instant martyr).
Continuing in the direction of the soldiers, I called upon the women to follow. A pair of arms
grabbed me and the voice of Regina Khayyat rang in my ears. “This is madness. Do you want to
risk the lives of the students? It will happen if the British raise a hand against you.” At the
thought of our unarmed sons doing battle against the weaponry of British troops, and of the
Egyptian losses sure to occur, I came to my senses and stopped still. We stood still while the sun
blazed down on us. The students meanwhile continued to encourage us, saying that the heat of the
sun would soon abate…The British also brought out Egyptian soldiers armed with sticks”
(Sha’rawi 1986: 112-113).
Ahmad Amin, the activist mentioned earlier, was responsible for producing leaflets for
the revolution. One such leaflet Amin wrote published the details of the ladies’ demonstration.
Despite the fact that the demonstration itself was numerically quite modest, the event was
deemed important enough by the nationalist and revolutionary press to report it before the
broader public. The symbolism of veiled women nonviolently protesting carried weight far
beyond their numbers:
One of the most important of these leaflets I remember was one I wrote after the ladies’
demonstration. On March 16, 1919, a group of high-class lasses and ladies met and formed a
demonstration which walked in the streets of the capital. They called for liberty, independence,
and the fall of the protectorate and injustice, and they waved little flags. After they had walked
for a long while, they reached one of the squares of the capital where the English encircled them
and pointed their rifles at them. But they were undaunted by this threat and one of them said,
“Fire your rifle at my breast and make of me another Miss Cavell.” Then they went away after
having stood in the sun for about two hours. So I wrote a long leaflet about this incident
describing this demonstration, its effect and agitation, and it was printed and distributed
(Amin 1978: 132).
There is a key difference between the causes behind why social actors adopt a specific
repertoire of contention compared to whether an episode remains predominantly nonviolent or
not; in this respect, contingency and how governments respond is crucial. For this episode, the
women possessed the option of escalating their confrontation, but there were participants in their
ranks who began to restrain Sha’arawi, warning her that continuing to march could provoke
violence on both sides. Given that the women were surrounded by officers with rifles, they
decided to remain stationed where they were. Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, the British commander
of the police forces in Cairo, later admitted in his memoirs that he was aware that clamping down
on veiled women protesters ran the risk of causing further popular outrage, and could engender
further mobilization among the masses. He opted for a strategy of containing and isolating their
march. He first attempted to quell the tensions by addressing the women, explaining that he
24
needed to obtain a permit in order to authorize the march. However, he had another plan in mind
as he explained in his recollections of the episode. Russell left his soldiers stationed with their
bayonets directed at the women, in effect containing the protest to prevent its diffusion. The
British commandant explained the episode from his vantage point in patronizing language:
My next problem was a demonstration by the native ladies of Cairo. This rather
frightened me as if it came to pass it was bound to collect a big crowd and my
orders were to stop it. Stopping a procession means force and any force you
use to women puts you in the wrong. Well, they assembled in motor cars, etc.,
got out and started to walk in a procession…I let them get a little way and then
blocked them in with police supported by troops and there the dear things had
to remain for an hour and a half in the hot sun with nothing to sit on except
the curb stone…At a given signal, I closed the cordon and the ladies found their
way opposed by a formidable line of Egyptian conscript police, who had been
previously warned that they were not to use violence but…considerable license
was given them by their officers to practice their ready peasant wit on the smart
ladies who confronted them (Pasha 1949: 208).
At the end of 1919 when the Milner Mission arrived in Egypt to investigate the
revolution with the aim of seeking a negotiated resolution, the women again demonstrated. They
conveyed in the Cathedral of Saint Mark and drafted a resolution to send to the British authority,
claiming that the design of the mission was to reinforce the imperial occupation of Egypt. They
sent an additional memorandum protesting their maltreatment during the demonstration, an
incident a number of protesters were assaulted by soldiers and one’s veil was torn off. A month
later, they reassembled at the cathedral and over one thousand attended—on this occasion, they
formed a political body for the first time titled the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee, where
Huda was elected president, an organizational body that would later lay the groundwork for
Egypt’s first feminist movement. (Additional details are needed to complete the account of the
revolution, which will likely result in this being two chapters in the text).
Conclusion
Colonial governmentality as one power apparatus historically functioned through an
assemblage of discourses and practices which shaped particular techniques and targets of
imperial rule. Instead of accepting dichotomies such as power/resistance or power/freedom,
subjects of resistance should be understood as existing in a mutually constitutive relationship
with global networks and relations of power. Dominant global discourses such as Wilsonian
principles of self-determination and highly gendered colonial discourses greatly influenced the
character of revolutionary counter-discourses and techniques of resistance. By analyzing this
mutually constitutive relationship, it becomes possible to not only advance our understanding of
25
the types of power which enable particular subjects to come into being, but to also rethink our
approaches to analyzing the embodied and situated subjects of civic resistance from a cultural
and a historical standpoint.
26
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