Confronting Fascism in Egypt

Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s

Israel Gershoni, James Jankowski

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

Confronting Fascism in Egypt offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italy's and Germany's expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system.

The authors place Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfolded—in Egypt's large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journals—emphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and "Islamo-Fascism."

Part I Narratives and Contexts

Introduction

Narratives of Modern Egyptian History

THE 1930S HAVE OFTEN been described as a decade of crisis in Egypt. Politically, the constitutional parliamentary regime established in the 1920s was being undermined by the manipulation of autocratic elements supported by the Egyptian monarchy. Economically, the world Depression of the early 1930s had a severe impact on an Egypt dependent on the now-depressed price of agricultural exports. Sociopolitically, the Egyptian younger generation, raised with high hopes for the future of a newly independent Egypt but progressively disillusioned by the partisan bickering of their elders, was being attracted to more authoritarian and presumably efficient political models. Intellectually and culturally, the decade of the 1930s has been defined as one that witnessed a “crisis of orientation” in which Egyptian intellectuals retreated from the liberal values that they had previously espoused and turned to a neotraditional and reactionary romanticism rooted in the glorification of the Arabo-Islamic heritage. This decade of crisis is posited to have marked a sharp departure from the recent course of Egyptian evolution that had witnessed the introduction and dissemination of liberal and secular concepts and practices influenced by those of the modern West. Compared to what had come before, the 1930s are often presented as a regressive decade in Egyptian history.¹

According to this master narrative of modern Egyptian history, the attitude of Egyptians toward political authoritarianism, most immediately toward the fascist model flourishing in much of Europe in the 1930s, became increasingly favorable. Egyptians are presented as having looked upon Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as successful alternatives to a failing parliamentary regime. The appeal of Fascism and Nazism is posited to have derived from the apparent ability of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler to transform their countries through economic rehabilitation, social mobilization, and the restoration of national self-confidence and pride. The greater emphasis on Islam in the 1930s is seen as having converged with this movement toward the acceptance of more authoritarian principles. Moreover, the continuing Egyptian nationalist struggle against British military occupation and political domination are believed to have reinforced a positive attitude toward Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. With both states striving to overturn the post–World War I international order dominated by Great Britain and France, the two fascist powers are assumed to have been seen by Egyptians as the natural allies of an Egypt itself struggling against Western European imperialism. In the master narrative, the axiom “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” was applied to Egypt. The eventual result of this perceived parallelism of interest was the attempt by some Egyptians to collaborate with the Axis powers during World War II.²

Our study critically reconsiders this narrative. By undertaking a detailed examination of the relevant Egyptian primary sources, a corpus relatively neglected until now, it presents quite a different picture of Egyptian attitudes toward dictatorship and democracy in the years immediately preceding World War II. Through focusing on a hitherto-hidden discourse, located in absent spheres and populated by silent voices whom we will attempt to allow to be heard, we hope to demonstrate that liberal ideas about both politics and society continued to be expressed with considerable vigor by Egyptian intellectuals and publicists, and correspondingly that an infatuation with authoritarian or fascist concepts of political organization was the exception rather than the norm in Egyptian public discourse even in the period when fascism was at its ideological and political zenith in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

When and how did the view that the 1930s witnessed the decline of liberalism and a corresponding attraction to fascism in Egypt emerge? Two successive narratives—one political, the other intellectual—contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the interpretation. The first to take shape was a political narrative relating to the presumed pro-Axis inclinations and activities of Egyptians. Already before World War II, British officials in Egypt suspected leading Egyptian political figures, particularly the cluster of politicians around ‛Ali Mahir (prime minister from August 1939 to June 1940) as well as Egypt’s King Faruq and his Palace advisers, of harboring pro-Axis sympathies and possibly engaging in pro-Axis intrigue.³ Fragmentary German documentation concerning secret Egyptian-German contacts during the war itself was first published, as a way of discrediting the Egyptian government and its involvement in the Palestine issue, in some of the polemical literature generated by the Arab-Zionist clash over Palestine in the late 1940s.⁴ Suspicions of prewar and wartime Egyptian contacts with the Axis powers were highlighted and given an academic imprimatur in the authoritative survey entitled The Middle East in the War published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1952.⁵

After the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, external speculation concerning Egyptian pro-Axis activities during World War II was augmented and given substance by an Egyptian self-narrative relating to the war years. The military men who seized power in Egypt in 1952 were vehemently anti-imperialist. The early years of the revolutionary regime were dominated by the effort to end the British occupation of Egypt, a goal eventually achieved in 1956. To legitimize their stature as fervid Egyptian nationalists, the early self-narrative of the Revolution’s leaders projected their anti-imperialist stance of the 1950s back into the 1940s. According to the collective remembrance they sought to disseminate to the Egyptian public in order to add historical depth to their anti-imperialist credentials, the anti-British activism of the Egyptian military went back to the difficult days of the war when the Egyptian army had been the locus of an underground movement directed against the British occupation, both considering (but not carrying out) an anti-British military uprising and engaging in (ultimately abortive) secret contacts with the Axis powers in the hope of weakening the dominant position of Great Britain in Egypt. The military’s disillusionment with the existing order was consolidated by the humiliating incident of February 4, 1942, when the British forced King Faruq, under threat of ouster, to install a pro-British Wafdist government.⁶

The story of wartime Egyptian-Axis contacts found in the Egyptian self-narrative was incorporated into much of the Western literature written about Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s. It was in part confirmed and given often-lurid detail in the memoirs of German agents and British counter-intelligence officers who had been involved in wartime German espionage and British counter-espionage,⁷ and was reiterated and augmented in the numerous Western journalistic and semi-scholarly accounts of the genesis of the Egyptian revolutionary regime that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.⁸ The final layer of the political narrative was provided by scholars working in the German archives, whose publications of the 1960s and 1970s documented German-Egyptian contacts based on archival materials. ⁹ By the 1970s, the narrative of Egyptian sympathy for the Axis powers during World War II had become accepted wisdom.¹⁰

In the 1960s, the political narrative developed in its basics in the 1940s and 1950s was overlaid by a more profound analysis of the unfolding of Egyptian ideological discourses offered by scholars working in the field of Middle Eastern intellectual history. The thesis of an Egyptian ideological rejection of liberal ideas and a corresponding turn of Egyptian discourse toward alternative principles of social and political life was initially articulated by Nadav Safran in his Egypt in Search of Political Community .¹¹ Safran’s influential interpretation of the evolution of Egyptian intellectual life in the interwar era holds that, after a “progressive phase” of intellectual development through the 1920s in which the political and social values associated with nineteenth-century European liberalism were absorbed and advocated by Egypt’s leading intellectuals, a “crisis of orientation” overtook many of these seminal thinkers by the 1930s. The most prominent manifestation of the crisis was the large-scale production of religiously oriented literature, particularly biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, the Rashidun Caliphs, and the early political and military heroes of Islam, by intellectuals whose previous writings had advocated a liberal orientation for Egypt and who had assumed that the adoption of European values and practices was the proper course of Egyptian development and modernization. By now embracing Islamic themes and emphasizing the glories of the Muslim past, these intellectuals were posited to have abandoned liberal-democratic and constitutional-parliamentary principles as the basis of their country’s culture and having become advocates of more traditionalist and inherently anti-Western ideas as an alternative to a failed liberal order. Thus the 1930s marked the beginning of a more “reactionary phase” of Egyptian intellectual development. ¹² For Safran, part and parcel of this reactionary phase was a rejection of parliamentary democracy and a turn toward more authoritarian concepts of government. As he summarized the latter process, “The great depression had given credence to the claims of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism that liberal democracy was a decaying system. The contrast between the misery, despair, and social discord that pervaded the Western democracies and the discipline, orderliness, and aggressive confidence that appeared to characterize the totalitarian regimes made a deep impression on Egyptians, who had seen in their own country a record of unmitigated failures of democracy.”¹³

Published with the imprimatur of Harvard University Press at a time when serious scholarship of Arab intellectual history was in its infancy, Safran’s interpretation that a transition from a “progressive” to a more “reactionary” phase in Egyptian intellectual life occurred during the 1930s has had wide currency. Although his construct of a “crisis of orientation” has been criticized as overly schematic, mistaking what was more a tactical shift in literary approach driven by considerations of popular appeal than a genuine fundamental change in outlook, ¹⁴ his parallel interpretation of Egyptian questioning of the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy and of a concomitant tilt toward authoritarian political principles has largely been accepted in subsequent scholarship. It was reiterated and reinforced by P. J. Vatikiotis’s survey The Modern History of Egypt, two chapters of which deal respectively with the liberal “Attack upon Tradition” in the early twentieth century and “The Failure of Liberalism and the Reaction against Europe” in the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁵ For Vatikiotis, “[t]he temporarily successful challenge Fascism and Nazism presented to the Western European democracies undermined constitutional government as a model for emulation by non-European societies. . . . The echo in Egypt was quite resounding. It was reflected in the rapid appearance of new social and political groups which, despite their different leadership, shared a belief in violence—the use of force for the attainment of political ends.”¹⁶ Thereafter, both Egyptian and Western scholars have generally accepted the broad outlines of the paradigm of a loss of faith in liberalism and a turn to authoritarian concepts on the part of Egyptian intellectuals and publicists in the 1930s. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot’s graphic description of the process is representative: “the crisis of democracies in the West had shaken the faith of many in the value of democracy. Admiration for Fascism grew when Mussolini made the trains run on time and forced the slackers to swallow castor oil. Some Egyptians believed that these methods might have more success in Egypt than those of the democratic institutions.”¹⁷

Both the political and the intellectual narratives that postulate a decline of liberal values and a corresponding attraction to more authoritarian principles on the part of Egyptians are reconsidered in this book. The study focuses primarily on the later 1930s, years when Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were at the height of their global influence and when Egyptian domestic conditions created a potentially favorable local context for the positive reception of fascist models. (Once World War II was under way, the imposition of strict wartime censorship in Egypt makes the evaluation of public opinion difficult, if not impossible.) Throughout, the work attempts to contextualize Egyptian opinion regarding liberalism versus fascism within the context of Egyptian domestic and international conditions, and within the context of heterogeneous and multivocal public sphere in which the public debate concerning fascism versus democracy occurred.

Three features of Egypt’s political and intellectual development during the 1930s that are usually adduced as evidence for a decline of liberalism and a trend toward authoritarianism are addressed in this book. One is the emergence and growth of organized movements that did reject much of the liberal package of values that had been endorsed by an earlier generation of Egyptians and, in place of liberalism, expounded an alternative set of social and political principles. That movements such as the Muslim Brothers (1928–) and Young Egypt (1933–) shared and gave vehement expression to the mood of disillusionment with parliamentary representative government as practiced in Egypt during the interwar period is indisputable. ¹⁸ That an inclination toward more authoritarian concepts of rule can be found in the alternatives expounded by these movements is also the case.¹⁹ Yet the characterization of these movements as “fascist” is inadequate. As Part III of this study demonstrates, spokesmen for the nonestablishment political movements of the 1930s articulated a variety of views on the merits and demerits of Fascism and Nazism, views that shifted significantly over time as the domestic and international agendas of both European movements unfolded and took on their full dimensions. Neither in regard to thei...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Egyptian Periodicals
• Part I Narratives and Contexts
• Part II Dictatorship versus Democracy in Egyptian Public Discourse
• Part III Egypt’s New Effendiyya and Fascism
• Conclusion - Shifting Narratives
• Reference Matter
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index