The New Egypt. A social sketch

Front matter

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE AUSTRALIANS: A SOCIAL SKETCH. Crown Svo, Cloth, ios. 6d. ' He has a graphic style . . . His book is distinctly readable . . . Unquestionably vivid. The author is a man of strong and definite opinions, to which he gives vigorous, if rough expression. Those who desire to know and understand Australia had better read this book.' — Globe. ' The articles are . . . brilliant, full of bright sayings, glowing enthusiasm, and pungent criticism.' — Whitehall Review. 'His criticisms are wanting neither in vigour nor acerbity.' — World. ' They are brilliant articles . . . Full of bright sayings, trenchant criticisms, and glowing enthusiasm.' — Sketch. ' There is not a little information, and some food for reflection to be extracted from his pages.' — Times. ' Well worth reading.

It is powerfully and thoughtfully written, and presents with clearness and vigour the problems with which this new Anglo-Saxon civilisation is face to face.' — Scotsman. ' A very vigorous account of the social life and prospects of a people he has lived amongst. . . . His always marked and decisive style.' — Bookman. LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN, Paternoster Square. a ©octal Sfcetcb BY FRANCIS ADAMS LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE TO J. W. L. The Friend who made of Friendship Brotherhood. CONTENTS. PAGE Editor's Preface, Preface, . XI XV Introduction, XIX

Part I

— ON THE SURFACE. i. Alexandria, 3 2. The Alexandrians, . 3. Narrative, 17 30 4. Cairo, 37 5. The Cairenes, 6. Narrative, 5^ 74 7. The Nile, 8. The Nilots, 82 99

Part II

-THE EARTH OPENS. 1. Narrative, 119 2. The Interview with Lord Cromer, 3. The Interview with the Khedive, 4. Narrative, .... 13° i4i 154 5. The Interview with Riaz Pasha, 6. The Interview with Tigrane Pasha, 7. Narrative, .... 173 i8o 190 Contents. X

Part III

— THE NEW EGYPT. PAGB 315 i. The Real Story of the Crisis, . 2. The Glory of England, . 231 ■»53 3. The Pledged Honour of England,

Appendix

. 289 Extracts from Blue Book, EDITOR'S

Preface

. The Author was at work on this book up to the evening of Saturday, September 2d, 1893. On the following Monday morning he died. Unfortunately the MS. was not quite complete, — a final chapter would have described the present nationalist movement in Egypt, — nor are the completed parts revised and corrected with the minute care Mr Adams was in the habit of bestowing on his writings. In spite of this, it has been thought well to publish The New Egypt. Mr Adams came back from Alexandria in the early summer of this year, imbued with the strongest and deepest feeling of sympathy for the country and people of Egypt. He Editor s Preface. XII at once set himself the task of writing a book which should, as he hoped and be lieved, put the circumstances of the English occupation in a truer light, and which should help to remove what he considered the ignorance or indifference of Englishmen with regard to Egyptian affairs.

Mr Adams was in exceedingly bad health ; he knew he had not long to live, but re solutely made up his mind to complete this task, if possible. For the last three months of his life he thought of nothing, cared for nothing, but the writing of this book. That once done he was ready for death, and there is no doubt that it was this strong desire to help the nationalist movement in Egypt which enabled him to battle so long against disease. Every page was written with effort, in constant struggle with growing weakness, but on every page he felt he was writing the truth as only a dying man could. It is the knowledge of these facts which Editor s Preface. XIII induces the present editor to produce The New Egypt, in spite of its imperfections, incompleteness, and even its inaccuracies, and traces of the physical weakness of the writer.

Some of the Author's friends may think the book does scant justice to his known literary power. Be that as it may, the book is Mr Adams' final effort against what he deemed to be corruption and wrong : to see it published was the one thing he cared to live for, and now that he is dead, it cannot be held back. J. W. LONGSDON. SURBITON, October, 1893. PR E FA CE. o All contemporary social criticism must suffer in especial from two curiously contrary causes — the superfluity of second-rate material, the poverty of first-rate material. For several reasons, — some at least of the principal of which will, I trust, appear in the course of these pages, — this is peculiarly the case with Egypt. The inadequacy of the grounds for arriving at a just and comprehensive judgment concerning the place and the people is indeed distressing, considering not only the gravity both to them and to us of the issues at stake, but also the pressing nature of these issues.

Preface. XVI That inadequacy applies, I believe, to everyone who has yet treated of contem porary Egypt. To some it applies more of course — to some less, and the well-informed in their own conceit will assuredly be found (as usual) far too frequently in the former category. At the same time I have not the least wish in the world to minimise my own want of good and accurate information on many, too many branches of this large and complicated question. Such a want seems to me quite inevitable. What I desire to point out is, that I have at least confined myself to those branches, or I may even say that branch, on which my informa tion was (let me declare) both fairly accurate and fairly good ; that I have in sum striven to show only what I have myself seen, and if it shall be held by the sagacious that the data are not sufficient, in either quality or quantity, for the deductions I draw from them, then let it be held thus.

Yet let it be held also that I have at anyrate based Preface. XVII these deductions on choses vues, and that I have built them up on no parti pris, but on the sincere effort to reach, as nearly as I was able, to the simple truth. It seems to me that sooner or later a considerable number of the more candid and intelligent of my countrymen will have to go through a great change, or, let us say, considerable modification of opinion on this matter. What I take to be a large body of the real facts of the case cannot be kept out of sight for much longer. We may accept them or reject them, act in this way by reason of them, or in that, but to per manently deny or ignore them is, I feel convinced, impossible.

Introduction

. Something over a year ago I started for Egypt. The main portion of my plan was to combine a winter sojourn in a country which greatly interested me with the ever delusive search for lost health. A subsidiary portion of it was to write a series of letters, embodying my 'impressions,' to a newspaper that had agreed to publish the same. I had no specialist acquaintance with the place or the people. Speaking more particularly of their present condition, social and political, I knew what most, educated men knew of it, though that is little enough when you arraign it at the bar of the severer criticism. I knew, for instance, that we English had Introduction. XX never wished to enter Egypt — that France, under Gambetta's guidance, had led us there, and under Freycinet's want of guidance had left us there — that we had acquitted ourselves rather poorly in bombarding Alexandria, and covered ourselves with glory in carrying Arabi's lines at Tel-el-Kebir, and in capturing Cairo and breaking up the last remnants of the revolt with a handful of horsemen.

I also knew that we had subsequently poured out limitless blood and treasure, with an imbecile heroism in our efforts, against an irruption of heroic imbeciles who had absolutely nothing to do with us. And, finally, I knew quite well — quite as well, I mean, as all this first and more or less historically demonstrable part — that, ever since then, we had been engaged in the most noble and unselfish work undertaken by a modern nation — to wit, the organisation of an administrative chaos, and the education of a suffering people in the art of true and enlightened self-government. Introduction. XXI I believed, I say, and was ready at all hours to give a more or less emphatic account of the belief that was in me, in the essential nobleness and unselfishness of our work in Egypt. I was just as confident about our educative mission there as I was of our administrative success.

And yet — and yet — (It seems absurd ; but what Englishman will not understand and sympathise with me ? ) I joined all this to a gentle but firm inner persuasion that Egypt had become, or was rapidly becoming, an integral portion of the Empire, and that anyone who spoke of our ' scuttling ' was to be treated with as much quiet contumely as was compatible with the personal circumstances. First, as regards the nobility and unselfish ness of our work in Egypt. I had read books galore, and newspaper lucubrations in magnificent excess, dealing with this sub ject. They differed, of course, in a hundred ways, in a thousand ways, in method and manner, in ability and sincerity, but on one c Introduction. XXII point their unanimity was, at least to my memory, absolute. They all agree, com pletely and conclusively, that that work was noble and was unselfish.

The simple truth is, that no other account was, or is, current among us. I do not recollect having ever heard or read anything serious to the contrary. Book writers, newspaper writers, political speakers, platform speakers, all seemed mono tonously at one as regards our work in Egypt. Why, I remember reading a review on a book on Egyptian Irrigation in the Athenæum, and the writer of it quite glowed with his patriotic enthusiasm over the noble ness and unselfishness of our work in Egypt. How, then, was it possible that I, almost an alien by the protraction of my sojourn in a far-off colony, should fail to accept and assimilate the ideas of all my friends on such a subject ? — Of all the books and newspapers I read ? — Of all the shining lights and reverberant bells I saw and heard in my native land ?

Introduction. XXIII The Empire, I argued, is a great and magnificent fact. No one must touch the Empire, and does not every square mile, every square yard, every square foot, every square inch over which the flag of the Em pire has flown, thereby become sanctified as a part of the Empire. This may be putting it rather extremely, and, when we are talking of Egypt, there is no need to do so, because we have to hand so much simple and sane statistic, seasoned by such floods of blood and treasure poured out in her behalf — such doubly redoubled indications of noble and unselfish labour expended ever since and up till now, that there is no need to mention the flag at all. The soberest Englishman, there fore, can feel that Egypt is justly and in evitably a part of the Empire. Well, such, at anyrate, was my inner con viction a year or more ago.

With such general ideas, vivified and established by a fair stock of particularised examples — did I stand, that lovely autumn evening, on the Introduction XXIV steamer's deck, as we moved slowly through the dark and waveless sea, under the moon less stars, towards the sparkling flash of the Alexandria lights. The magic name of Pharos passed among us. Other names — names that recalled the last of the English sea-fights — passed also, and I felt the stimulus of an approach to a new place and a new people — to a civilisation in so many ways different to our own as to be looked upon as alien. I think that this is the one stimulus which still remains unimpaired in the disillusionised Modern — the last in firmity of the life-wearied scion of an age that knows (as the Australian poet says) not only ' quite enough, but a trifle too much.' How such a stimulus was likely to be sustained in such a place as Alexandria may now appear.

Part I On The Surface

A I. ALEXANDRIA. About a hundred miles from the Mediterranean sea-coast, the Nile, after reaching a maximum breadth of from three to four miles, divides itself into two large branches. The easterly branch flows down to Damietta, the mouth being distant some thirty miles from Port Said, the entrance to the Suez Canal. The westerly branch passes through Rosetta to the head of a small peninsula. From here the coast sweeps westward in a deep bay — the Bay of Aboukir — ending in another and smaller peninsula and two little islands, one of which, bearing the name of Nelson, recalls the fact that this was the scene of the famous Battle of the Nile. Once more the coast sweeps away, though in a much less bold concavity, and once more ends in a still smaller peninsula. This peninsula has a peculiarity.

The head of it is not pointed, but hammer-shaped, and it thus naturally forms two harbours, one on the east side, and one on the west. Speaking roughly, Alexandria consists of this peninsula and of the foreshore of these two harbours. A curious little history is attached to it. When the great Macedonian, from whom the town takes its name, chose the site of it, with the unerring instinct of genius, as the one really practicable port along the whole coast, the Nile mouths being blocked with sand, no peninsula existed. 'The Island of Pharos,' says Strabo, ' is oblong in shape, and, being situated close to the shore, forms by its position an excellent roadstead. The shore is hollowed out into a large bay, terminated at either end by two promontories, which jut out into the sea, and which have the island between them, like a rampart in the middle of the bay.' Feasible as this position seemed to Alexander, when supplemented by a canal connecting it with the Nile, Ptolemy Soter — the first of his lieutenants to assume the crown of Egypt, and otherwise famous as the erector of the splendid Pharos lighthouse, which was accounted one of the seven wonders of the world — thought he could improve on it.

He joined the island, therefore, to the mainland by a stone causeway, called, from its length, the Heptastadion, thus making two harbours of one, though he kept them joined by a dock channel. The course Alexandria. 5 of events, however, supplemented by the sea currents, has changed all this, and the Hepta stadion has so completely become a natural feature that now few Alexandrians are aware of the artificial character of much of their town. There is yet another aspect of the place which must be reckoned with. The base ofthe inverted triangle, which forms the absolute delta of the Nile, is about ninety miles as the crow flies from river - mouth to river-mouth, but the real delta extends another forty or fifty miles to the east and west of these mouths. All along this stretch of coast, the general trend of which is bent outwards, there is a series of lagoons.

The largest is that which lies between Damietta and Port Said, which is forty miles across and twenty miles broad. Another, almost as long but more irregular and not so broad, is to the east of the Rosetta mouth. To the west of it there is a complete chain of these lagoons which com pletely surround Alexandria, excepting for the thin strips of desert which intersect them. The largest of these is Lake Mareotis, which virtu ally renders the town unapproachable on the south, east, and west, except by the narrow course of the railway and canal running along such a strip (the one to the Nile and the other south-east towards Cairo) or by the coastal rail way from Rosetta. This salty and malarious swamp was once a sweet-water lake, teeming, it is said, with fish. But the English, at a crisis in the long and em bittered national struggle with France in the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries, let the sea into it, and the aggravated feature of miasmatic breezes from the south must be taken into consideration, when one would understand the large part played in the temperament of the Alexandrians by the curious physical situation of their town.

There remains the history of the town itself, and the ethnological formation (so to say) of its inhabitants. Of the old Alexandria of the Ptolemies no thing whatever exists, and the same may also be said of the Alexandria of the Roman Emperors. This city, which Greek culture and science, acting on the superb natural re sources of the country and the patient industry of the Egyptian race, made the first in the Mediterranean — which Roman energy and or ganisation made only second to the metropolis of the empire — sank under the factious rule of divided races into insignificance and decay. Neither Greece nor Rome, nor Christianity in the flush of its first political triumphs, fixed Alexandria. 7 any permanent mark on the mobile and fecund beauty of Egypt. They came and went, and the great monuments of the true genius of the land remained, and the mass of the true stock of the land remained ; all else passed.

Halfway through the seventh century the mighty wave of Arab expansion swept across it, and Amrou besieged and took Alexandria, still rich with relics of her former greatness. No one ever realised more completely than this admirable general, and his even more admirable master, the character of the place and the people. Exhausted by the immense and pro tracted effects of a distant and almost super human past, with all mental and moral audacity dead in them, nothing of great or good re mained to this proto-Semitic stock save their lower attributes. The body was there, but the soul was gone. The prodigious fecundity of the Nile Valley was still all but matched by that of a people which troubled itself only to eat that it might live. Amrou's day was not the day of statistics, but he seems to have appreciated the full significance that underlies such a fact as the following extract from a list of the highest birth-rates per iooo recorded among ninety five towns all over the earth : — Port Said, 73.7 ; Alexandria, 57.9 ; Cairo, 55.4 ; Suez and Ismailia, 54.2; Chemnitz, 44.8; Buenos Ayres, 39.7 ; Diisseldorf, 39.1.

Thus he wrote to his master, the Khalif Omar, 'It is a people, pro tected by heaven, and which, like the bees, seems only fated to work for others, without itself reaping the fruit of the sweat of its brow.' Islam, the younger stock of the Semites, was also now in it turn to strive to impress itself with some degree of permanence on Egypt. Beginning with this large-minded Arabian Khalif, who anticipated the Suez Canal by his juncture ofthe Nile and the Red Sea, and con tinuing by great builders and encouragers of learning like Moezz, the creator of Cairo as a centre of Arabian culture, the same work was carried on in the successive conquests of the Kurds or Saracens (the best known of whom is the famous Saladin), and after a period of anarchic military despotism, under the Mame lukes (the foreign soldier caste), in those of the Turks — ten centuries in all.

The Mamelukes then once more attained the mastery, which was shaken by the French invasion under Bonaparte, and annihilated a decade later by the Turkish Pasha, Mehemet Ali, the con queror of Arabia, Syria and the Soudan, and, had it not been for European intervention, per haps of Constantinople itself. Alexandria. 9 In the lofty citadel which dominates Cairo is the gorgeous, if somewhat pompous, mosque which bears his name. This man — in many ways still the dominant figure of modern Egypt, almost as large-minded as Omar, and certainly more ruthless — sleeps well after the more than usually fitful fever of this life, and with him sleeps also assuredly the fiercely protracted effort of Islam to Arabianise Egypt. It is important to understand the main features of Egyptian geography ; it is important to understand the main features of Egyp tian history ; but it is quite as important as either to understand the genius of this extraordinary adventurer.

He is still, I say, the dominant figure of the time of the modern, the New Egypt. He is the tutelary hero of the party, not only of progress, but of power. His foreign origin is forgotten ; his foreign name is nationalised, and every good Egyptian speaks of Mahommed, not of Mehemet Ali. Taking the remains of the shattered Turkish supremacy, the still physically unimpared Turks who had retired with a sulky scorn from Alex andria into a quarter of their own — the old isthmus of the Heptastadion, to wit — and, unit ing them with his Albanian troops and fellow countrymen, he found that he had here an unbreakable backbone for a splendid army ready to his hand. With these he crushed the Mamelukes : with these he organised the Egyptians — Arabs, quasi-Arabs, or Nilots — and welded together by sheer genius and brutal compulsion all these discordant elements into something approaching a nationality.

The same brain and hand that schemed and carried out the treacherous massacre of the Mamelukes in the citadel alleys, presided over the great canal from Alexandria to the Nile, which cost from 30,000 to 40,000 lives of im pressed fellaheen, but which seemed to him an achievement as absolutely necessary as the other if he was to create a new Alexandria and a new Egypt. In order to attract the energy and capital of Europe, and force into existence a host of 'native industries,' he offered what have become shameful advantages to Europeans. He desired a modern fleet and army, and, if he never for a moment paused to think of its terrible cost to a country whose inexhaustible wealth must, he saw, in the long run bring it out safe and sound, who shall yet say, when he has lain for barely forty years in his grave, that so far as the actual facts went he was wrong ?

And if he did not calculate on inept successors to carry through his vast and complicated work to fulfilment, did Julius Cæsar calculate on two such miracles of ade- Alexandria. 11 quacy as Augustus and Tiberius, each as ab solutely fitted to their special phase of it as he was himself? ' And if, lastly, Mahommed Ali did not wholly enter into account with certain intrinsic and unescapable elements in the temperament and genius of the Alexandrians, of the Cairenes, of the immemorial Nilots, yea, of the Soudanese, what more shall it prove than that the combinations of the future are always incommeasurable ? His huge statue of bronze is in the Grand Square at Alexandria, on a lofty marble pedestal, and there we behold him imperious and yet self-contained, seated on his Arab horse, turbaned, and in the old Turkish national cos tume, and the polyglot townsfolk, for whose existence he is so largely responsible, pullulate in his shadow, doing obeisance to his grim yet fiery spirit as to that of the saviour and regen erator of his country.

The Grand Square, otherwise the Place Mahommed Ali, otherwise the Place des Con suls — (there is a charming flux in the nomen clature of the Alexandrian streets, the names of which the ingenuous stranger seeks for the most part in vain anywhere than on a map of the town) — this is in every way the centre of the new Alexandria. From here radiate, or rather rectangulate, all the new rectlineal thoroughfares so dear to the heart of the devotee ofthe Haus mannisation of cities. They form together a wonderful sample of the combination of the decorative and constructive tawdriness with the shoddy squalor of modern Italy. It is just this — the' Italianisation of the buildings^ which strikes one at once and impresses one more and more. ' Modern Italian architecture is so abjectly null — so merely a vapid imitation of the French — that at first sight it seems astonishing to find it triumphing in all the new seaports of the Mediterranean.

It entirely dominates La Valetta, for example, but then Malta is within boat sail of Sicily, and the populace is more than half Italianate. But how comes it that in this distant capital of the Turkish Sforza of the nineteenth century, whose own constructive efforts (his palace of Razel-el- Tin — Fig-tree Cape — on the western horn of the peninsula, is the Alexandrian exemplar), though meretricious enough, are at least not wanting in the saving graces of either energy or solidity, this flimsy and void pretentiousness should live, flourish and prevail ? It would seem as if in this, as in every de partment of the national life, the same fatal development had to be undergone. The end of Mahommed Ali was as terrible and tragic as all the rest. It came in the shape of the dark Alexandria. 13 despair of insanity.' Ibrahim, his eldest son, though only so by adoption, the renowned leader of the Soudan campaigns of conquest, and of the victorious advance through Syria and Asia Minor on Constantinople, was Viceroy for only four months, dying before his father (1849).

His nephew Abbas, after a reign of five years, during which the Suez Canal and the Cairo Railway were begun, was followed by Mahommed Said, who ruled nine years, and then gave place to Ismail, the son of Ibrahim — the ' Pasha of many tales,' from the sale of Canal shares and Soudan equatorial expeditions down to Italian opera troupes and quite too comprehensive harem festivities — and this, thanks to the fatal coil of things, was the one stable successor the old man of blood and iron found for his ' ideas.' It is not possible, perhaps, to take Ismail himself so seriously. Mahommed Ali, when he contemplated the introduction of the Euro pean civilisation, meant something very different from the absurd and brainless Bacchanalia of its follies and vices, which seemed so good and delectable a thing to his 'grandson.' Ismail made Egypt a hot-bed of little more than the parasites of that civilisation.

In him, as the result of his Occidentalising taste, at once so crude and so rudimentary, even those follies and vices took a common and childish shape. French wit, French audacity were beyond him. He had no idea of even the art sencanailler avec esprit, of going to the dogs in good style. He contented himself with the bastard Italianate version of the process, and tenth rate scamps of both sexes, for once in a way enjoyed first-rate opportunities of luxuri ous success. ' Trade and commerce became a matter of court intrigue — the very basest species of speculative gambling known to man or woman. Instead of the creative energy of English and French manufacturers and merchants, which the old man had de sired, Italy and Greece, with their impotent superficiality, were allowed to master everything.

The Grcsculus esuriens found himself in his happy hunting-grounds, with an Italiot brother as ravenous and ignoble as himself. The 'nationalism' of the Great Initiator was cast aside as a piece of antiquated folly. The fever for exploitation, the frenzied desire to make a fortune without working** for it, con sumed the minds of all this wanton and gluttonous mob. They swarm like flies upon a wounded and helpless animal. The country existed merely to be eaten alive. Omar had at least taken to heart this much of the fable of Amron, concerning the bee-like nature of Alexandria. 15 the Egyptians, that he kept the hive clean. Ismail was so idiotically heedless, so stupidly corrupt, that he had not only permitted the hive to be polluted through and through, but absolutely prevented the bees from working, and reached the imbecile pitch of contemplating its demolition with a sort of heavy cynical glee.

Ismail, the dominant figure of the Egypt of yesterday, still survives in a more or less elegant repose, albeit in 'another place,' and so for the most part do his chief assistants in that epoch of insensate orgy. For, as usual, the hour of retribution, with its blind revenge (which, as Bacon reminds us, is ' a wild kind of justice '), fell heaviest on the innocent and the comparatively unoffending. I find one feature of the' massacre of the Europeans in Alexandria on the memorable June 11, 1882, and of the subsequent sack of the city, peculiarly significant. The Grand Square, the scene of so much of the Ismailian theatricalities, was wrecked from end to end, and its footways smeared with blood. .The mob slew and destroyed and spared not. They plundered house and hotel, they insulted and outraged living and dead, as only savage and brutalised slaves in revolt against an un scrupulous past can insult, and plunder, and outrage.

But one person and one thing they The Neiv Egypt. respected. Mahommed Ali sat on there in the midst of it on his Arab horse,- imperious yet self-contained, turbaned and in the dress of the antique dominancy, and watched un disturbed this rank and rapid harvesting of his perverted schemes for his people. Ismail had brought things to this horrible and furious pass,'- masquerading all the time in the cast off clothes of the Great Initiator. But even these fanatical Egypto-Turks, with their blood stained clubs, even these degraded Egypto- Arabs, the scamps of the scamps, the ex asperated parasites of the parasites, knew it.c Everything else there was ransacked, de secrated and destroyed. The statue remained untouched. THE ALEXANDRIANS. There has always been something factious about the Alexandrians.