The rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s descendants, from Khedive Ismail to King Farouk, was subject to scrutiny in two new memoirs. The first is a translation of Walter Frederick Miéville’s Under Queen and Khedive: The Autobiography of an Anglo-Egyptian Official. Originally published in 1899, the book was translated by Hossam Mahran and published by Nahdet Misr in 253 pages under the same title of Fi Khedmat Al-Maleka wal Khedewi.
The second is Mudhakirat Al-Amir Abbas Halim: Al-Amir Za’aim Al-Omal. This is the memoir of Prince Abbas Halim, a member of the Egyptian ruling family who associated himself closely with the Egyptian labour movement. Published by Al-Maraya, this 270-page book is a compilation of accounts shared by Abbas Halim himself with journalist Morsi Al-Shafa’i. The accounts were serialised in Al-Mussawwar, a widely circulated weekly magazine, between November 1958 and June 1959. The series was revised by Ayman Abdel-Moa’tti who wrote an introduction to the book and added explanatory footnotes to qualify some of the statements made in the memoirs.
The two volumes deal with the last years of the rule of Khedive Ismail (1867-1879) to the eve of 1952 Revolution. Along with Khedive Ismail, they cover Khedive Tawfik, Khedive Abbas Helmi II, King Fouad and King Farouk. However, they share a very similar narrative: these five monarchs were not up to ruling the country; they were too associated with the British – despite the occasional squabble – and willing to compromise their authority to accommodate them; they paid very little attention to the well-being of the Egyptian population and only cared about perpetuating their rule.
Each of the two volumes focuses on a specific segment of the seven decades in question. Miéville starts with Ismail and continues down to Abbas Helmi II, and Halim starts with Abbas Helmi II and continues to the 1952 Revolution. Obviously, being in the royal vicinity, Halim has a much closer take on the monarchs and associates involved. Halim has many stories to share about the personalities of both Fouad and his son and successor Farouk, the two spouses of Fouad, Chouicar and Nazli, and the two spouses of Farouk, Farida, born Safinaz, and Nariman. He gives accounts of the behaviour of Fouad and Farouk as two egocentric monarchs who had troubled marriages and were only focused on eliminating all opposing voices, even those that came from the closest circles. They only favoured those who appeased them. They both had a confused relationship with their entourage, with members falling out of favour on the spur of the moment for no particular reason only to be replaced by others on a whim.
Halim’s memoirs, which were clearly published during the rule of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the heyday of monarchy defamation, completely challenge the claim that became fashionable in Egypt in the early 2000s about a “liberal and democratic” belle epoch. According to Halim neither Fouad nor Farouk had any respect for democracy and they both, each in a different way, worked to serve their interests and to play the political parties and political leaders of the time against each other.
Actually, Halim discredits the leaders of these parties as being disinterested in putting aside their narrow political interests in the interests of the nation. Halim recalls disappointment over the reaction of some of these leaders to whom he reached out, in order to lobby support for a political initiative he offered to unify the ranks in support of a call for reforms and democracy, in the mid 1940s.
Halim recalls the details of a telephone conversation he had with Moustafa Al-Nahhas, the leader of Al-Wafd at the time. Al-Nahhas, according to Halim, declined the initiative, insisting that the nation is “already unified under my leadership”. This was the case despite the fact that the core of Halim’s initiative were the principles of the 1919 Revolution which was associated with Al-Wafd and which, as Al-Shafa’i wrote in his introduction, had a clear impact on Halim’s political formation.
Moreover, Halim stops short of accusing King Farouk and his associates of being behind the January 1952 fire that hit Cairo amidst demonstrations in which all political groups and parties, from right to left, took part. The city was burning, he said, with the fire extinguishers and the police just looking the other way. He actually said that when he tried to spare the Automobile Club, a young Wafdist told him, “Please, Excellency, do not stand in the way; we have to burn the club.” This was happening, Halim wrote, while Farouk was having an uninterrupted banquet with top police and army officers. “They only moved when all the damage was done,” he wrote.
Only Farouk and the British would have benefited from this fire – irrespective of how it was masterminded, he argued. The king wanted to be rid of the Al-Wafd government that was imposed by the British and the British wanted to distract the public from Suez where they were coming under attack from the national Egyptian resistance.
The title of the book is reference to the close association that Halim had with the labour movement in Egypt, which was quite active at the time and had much appreciation for Halim’s support and faith in the social and economic value of the nation’s blue collars. However, this association was not to the liking of either Fouad or Farouk, who feared all sorts of popular movements. Inevitably, Halim was sent to jail twice and deprived of his royal titles. Like other members of the royal family, Halim was tried after the July Revolution. A jail sentence was suspended on the intervention of Anwar Sadat, a member of the Revolution Council.
In direct contrast to the setting of Halim’s memoirs, Miéville’s is one of a young and deprived British young man who arrived in the country to pursue better living and accepted small jobs within the many quarters of the British occupation apparatus to improve his income. Miéville’s account, however, is clear about the state of political chaos that dominated the country from the day he arrived to the day he left. Like Halim, Mieville talks a lot about a corrupt Khedivial palace, an overpowering British impact, especially since Khedive Ismail had to give up his shares of the Suez Canal to the British government in a debt swap exercise.
Due to the excessive debts policy of Khedive Ismail, Mieville wrote, Egypt was on the verge of total bankruptcy when he arrived in 1874. Under Ismail, Egypt had a national debt of over £100 million sterling as opposed to no more than three millions when he acceded to the throne. It was only to be expected, he argues, that the huge weight of debt would eventually force Ismail to succumb to the Anglo-French Condominium in Egypt that started in 1875.
The dominant features in the political outlook on his arrival in Egypt in 1874 were corruption, oppression and incipient bankruptcy, and the figure and personality of Khedive Ismail then stood out head and shoulders above all others, he wrote. According to his account and the text of cables that were sent from the office of the British consul in Egypt to the office of the prime minister in London, Egypt’s problems under Ismail, as they would be albeit to a lesser extent under his two successors Tawfik and Abbas Helmi II, were much more complex. Mieville is talking about a near total disconnect between the palace and the people. This was not just the account of the British, according to the dispatches he quoted in his book, but also that of the French.
The Orabi Revolt, during the rule of Khedive Tawfik, receives much attention in Mieville’s memoirs. Orabi, “the peasant soldier”, as he calls him, was the figure that prompted respect – not the Khedive who was widely perceived as a failed ruler. Clearly, the cables on Orabi in the memoirs, qualify him as a source of danger to the control of the British whose occupation of Egypt in 1882 was only facilitated by Khedive Tawfik.
Mieville uses the same tone in his recollection of the Mahdist Uprising in Sudan, where he served during his stay in Egypt – given that Egypt and Sudan were one entity at the time. The episode of Mieville’s service in Sudan, then under the Egyptian throne, show a land remarkably underdeveloped. However, despite the discrepancies in the level of development between Egypt and Sudan, Mieville is not hesitant in showing the acute colonial approach that the British have towards the Egyptian and Sudanese populations alike.
Mieville’s sojourns in Egypt as shared in his memoir show a country that allowed foreign communities many privileges – more so the British and the French and less so the Italians and Greeks. This was the case even for poorer Europeans like Mieville himself. The memoir takes Mieville around several parts of Egypt. He shares reflections on spaces for entertainment in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. In so doing, he reveals, perhaps with very little shame, a level of disdain for Egyptians and poorer Europeans.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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