EGYPT.

Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, and strategically straddling the Suez Canal and the Nile River, has had a major role in Europe's relations with the Middle East since 1914. Great Britain, the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1882, retained significant control and an extensive military presence there until 1956, despite ever-growing resistance from Egyptian nationalists. The 1952 Revolution, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) and the Suez Crisis of 1956 brought British influence in Egypt to an abrupt end. In the 1950s the charismatic Nasser was a strong exponent of pan-Arab unity and emerged as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement in the conflict between the superpowers. By the 1960s, however, he increasingly relied on military and economic aid from the Soviet Union to implement his plans for modernization and economic growth. The defeat of Egypt and its Arab allies in the June 1967 war against Israel dealt a severe blow to Nasser's policies, and his successor, Anwar el-Sadat (1918–1981), initiated peace talks with Israel. The Camp David Accords of 1978 brought peace with Israel and aid from the United States, and although Sadat was assassinated in 1981 his successor, Hosni Mubarak (b. 1928), has preserved much of his legacy. Over these decades, Egypt's society and economy have been strained by explosive population growth and rapid urbanization, and its authoritarian government has often suppressed domestic dissent, most notably that led by Islamic radicals.

EGYPT AND EUROPE BEFORE 1914

Egypt's modern history began abruptly in 1798 with the French invasion and occupation led by Napoleon I (1769–1821). The French forces left within a few years, but European influence in Egypt—especially Anglo-French influence—grew steadily thereafter. Throughout the nineteenth century Egypt remained under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan, but its rulers, Mehmet Ali (also known as Muhammad Ali, 1769–1849) (r. 1805–1849) and his successors, were de facto independent. Their efforts to modernize Egypt's military and economy along Western lines saw little success, and Egypt's growing debt to European lenders culminated in the British invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1882. The occupation allowed the British to consolidate their control of the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, which they saw as the lifeline of the empire, a crucial communication link to its possessions in Asia. Though Egypt's monarch retained his crown, after 1882 its de facto ruler was the British consul general in Cairo. Under Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring, 1841–1917) (r. 1883–1907) and his successors, Egypt attained a measure of stability: a legislative assembly was established and modern political parties and press developed. At the same time, the period saw the beginnings of a nationalist sentiment to resist British rule.

WARTIME PROTECTORATE AND THE
1919 REVOLUTION

When the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allied powers in November 1914, London immediately declared Egypt a British protectorate. Egypt served as a staging ground for the British offensive against the Ottoman possessions in the Levant. Martial law was declared, and wartime requisitions and conscription made life difficult for the population at large and aroused widespread anti-British sentiments. When the armistice was announced, Egyptian nationalists demanded that Egypt be granted independence in line with the principle of self-determination. The British government refused, and widespread protests broke out across Egypt, launching the "1919 Revolution," which augured a new era of Egyptian nationalism. If prior to 1919 the nationalist movement had been largely limited to urban intellectual elites, it now mobilized far broader sections of the middle classes and the peasantry. The Wafd, the new nationalist party that led the movement, would dominate Egyptian politics until 1952.

BRITISH POWER AND EGYPTIAN NATIONALISM UNDER THE MONARCHY (1922–1952)

Continued Anglo-Egyptian negotiations could not make progress, and in 1922 London issued a unilateral declaration granting Egypt formal independence, but retaining control of the Canal, external defense, protection of foreigners and minorities, and the Sudan. In 1923 Egypt officially became a constitutional monarchy under King Fuad I (1868–1936, r. 1917–1936). The next two decades were marked by internal political conflict between the Wafd, which advocated the expansion of parliamentary democracy and had a broad support base among Egypt's growing middle classes, and the royal court, which aimed to curtail the power of parliament and was supported by the large landowners and industrialists. Early on the British saw the king as a pliable instrument for their influence, but by the 1930s they began to recognize the Wafd as the representative of the Egyptian people, with whom they must reach an accommodation. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which highlighted British weakness as well as Egypt's own vulnerability to attack, helped break the impasse. In the ensuing Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 the military occupation of Egypt was declared terminated, and Egypt was admitted to the League of Nations in 1937. The treaty recognized Egyptian sovereignty over the Suez Canal but allowed British troops to remain in the Canal Zone to secure it for the empire.

In Egypt, as elsewhere in the world, the 1930s were a time of economic crisis and the concomitant rise of new ideas about politics and society. If the 1920s in Egypt had been a "liberal era," a period of experimentation with constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy, in the 1930s fascism seemed to be the wave of the future, and its attractions in Egypt added another facet to anti-British sentiments. The interwar period also saw a significant evolution in the ideological nature of Egyptian nationalism. If in the 1920s it had been largely liberal-secular and territorial, the 1930s saw a growing interest in Egypt's identity as an Islamic and Arab nation. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 to advocate moral and social reform, became increasingly politicized in the ensuing years. The 1930s also saw Egypt's emergence as a leader on pan-Arab issues, culminating in the formation of the Arab League in Cairo in 1945.

When World War II broke out Egypt remained neutral even after Axis troops invaded its territory from Libya, and large sections of the public openly hoped for Axis victory. At the same time, Britain's military presence in Egypt during the war far exceeded the limits set in the 1936 treaty, as did its involvement in politics, and tensions remained high. The United Nations decision to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews, creating the State of Israel, precipitated military intervention by the surrounding Arab states in May 1948, but military weakness and conflicting interests led to an Arab defeat. The trauma of 1948 underscored, for many Egyptians, the corruption and ineptitude of the old elites—the royal court, large landlords, big industrialists—who bowed before foreign imperialists and enjoyed decadent privilege while most Egyptians remained mired in poverty. The escalating tensions culminated in July 1952 with a bloodless coup by a group of young military men, the Free Officers, led by the thirty-four-year-old Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser was a charismatic leader who wanted Egypt to lead the Arab nations out of their political, social, and economic malaise to become strong and prosperous. His powerful persona and ideology of pan-Arab nationalism and socialism would dominate the politics of Egypt, and much of the Arab world, in the 1950s and 1960s.

THE NASSER ERA: ARAB NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM (1952–1970)

The new regime moved quickly to transform Egyptian society. Land reform came first, with large estates broken up and divided among the peasantry, and old aristocratic titles eliminated. The 1956 constitution laid out the new regime's vision: Egypt was an Arab and Islamic nation; the state would provide social welfare; imperialism, feudalism, and monopoly capital would be dismantled. Although it was formally constituted as a democracy, Egypt in fact became a presidential dictatorship; political parties were banned, and potential competitors for power, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, were suppressed.

Nasser's early years in power saw a string of victories in the international arena. First came the Anglo-Egyptian agreement of 1954, which provided for the withdrawal of the remaining British forces from the Canal Zone within twenty months, and in 1955 Nasser emerged as a major world leader at the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations. In 1956 Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal led to a combined Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Nasser remained defiant, however, and firm pressure from the United States government forced the invaders to retreat. Nasser emerged from the "Triple Aggression," as it is known in Egypt, the clear victor. After seventy-four years of military occupation, British power in Egypt abruptly ended, and the efforts of the United States to replace Britain as Egypt's patron met with failure. Nasser's prestige in the Arab world reached new heights. He was the first Arab leader to harness the power of radio to influence public opinion across the region, and his fiery speeches against the imperialists and their collaborators among the "reactionary" Arab regimes helped topple the pro-Western monarchy in Iraq in 1958; King Hussein (r. 1952–1999) of Jordan only narrowly avoided the same fate. Nasser's vision of pan-Arab unity seemed to materialize in 1958 when Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic (UAR) under Nasser's leadership.

Nasser's regional ambitions, however, soon came up against the divergent interests of other Arab governments, as well as U.S. power. With the "Eisenhower Doctrine" of 1957, which promised to defend any Middle Eastern nation threatened by "international Communism," the United States managed to preserve the pro-Western regimes in Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Iraq's new leaders resisted Egyptian meddling in their internal affairs, and Egypt's union with Syria collapsed in 1961. As Nasser's domestic agenda grew more socialist, with widespread nationalization of industry, Egypt became increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for military and economic aid. In 1962 Egyptian troops became entangled in the civil war in Yemen, and Nasser's support for Palestinian incursions into Israel further escalated regional tensions. By May 1967 the battle over Arab opinion pushed Nasser to take a stand against Israel: he demanded the removal of United Nations observers in the Sinai Peninsula and closed the Red Sea straits to Israeli shipping. Nasser may not have intended to bring about a full-scale war, but for Israel Nasser's actions were casus belli, and Israel launched a preemptive attack. After six days of fighting, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were decisively defeated, and Israel occupied territory on all three fronts: the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, respectively. The defeat of 1967 dealt a mortal blow to Nasser's stature, both regional and domestic, and his ideal of pan-Arab unity; and Egypt's efforts to regain some of its lost territory in the War of Attrition (1969–1970) against Israel also ended in failure. When he died in September 1970, at the age of only fifty-two, he was, personally and politically, a broken man.

SADAT: WAR, PEACE, AND THE TURN WEST (1970–1981)

Nasser's vice-president, Anwar el-Sadat, succeeded him upon his death. Like Nasser, Sadat came from humble origins, rose through the ranks of the military, and took part in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Like Nasser, he wanted to make Egypt strong and prosperous; but the road he chose to these goals was, in many respects, the polar opposite of Nasser's. If Nasser relied on the Soviet Union for economic and military aid, Sadat led Egypt into the American camp; and while Nasser restructured the Egyptian economy along the lines of state socialism, Sadat would turn to capitalism and seek foreign investment. Like his predecessor, however, Sadat suppressed political dissent and kept a large role for the state in the economy.

Sadat's first mission when he came to power was to erase the shame of the 1967 defeat. In this he achieved spectacular success, engineering a coordinated surprise attack on Israel by Egyptian and Syrian forces in October 1973 (The Yom Kippur War or the October War). Although the Arabs did not achieve a decisive military victory, they scored a major psychological and strategic coup. The 1973 war proved that Arab armies could match Israel on the battlefield, restored Arab confidence, and shook the Israeli leadership out of its post-1967 hubris. But 1973 was only the first part of Sadat's plan. In 1977 he shocked the world with an unprecedented trip to Jerusalem, launching negotiations that led to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 under American auspices, restored all of the Sinai to Egypt. But early hopes that the accords would serve as a basis for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace did not materialize; after 1977 Egypt was ostracized in the Arab world for more than a decade. The peace with Israel, and Sadat's continued suppression of domestic dissent, also alienated many in Egypt itself, and in October 1981 Sadat was assassinated by a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. He was succeeded by his vice president, Hosni Mubarak.

EGYPT UNDER MUBARAK (1981–)

The Mubarak regime has largely kept Sadat's legacy in place. It remained committed to peace with Israel but gradually managed to improve relations with the Arab states—in 1989 Egypt was readmitted into the Arab League. Egypt also remained an ally of the United States and a major recipient of U.S. military and economic aid, providing important support to the U.S.–led coalition during the Gulf War of 1991. Domestically, Mubarak experimented with a tentative opening of the political system. But in the mid-1990s, a wave of terror attacks by Muslim radicals against foreign tourists—one of Egypt's most important sources of income—led to a renewed crackdown on opposition groups, with dozens of Muslim militants arrested and executed. By 2004, after almost a quarter-century in power, the seventy-six-year-old Mubarak had yet to designate an heir, and it remained unclear in which direction Egypt would go after he was no longer on the scene.

POPULATION AND ECONOMY

As in much of the developing world, Egypt's population grew rapidly over the course of the twentieth century due to improvements in hygiene, healthcare, and diet. From 1900 to 1950 the population doubled from about 10.5 million to 21 million, and since then it has more than tripled, reaching an estimated 77 million by 2005. At the same time, large-scale migrations from the countryside have swelled the urban population. In 1914 more than 85 percent of the populace farmed the arable strip of land along the Nile—less than 5 percent of Egypt's total land area—where the density of rural population is among the highest in the world. By 2004 only about a third of the Egyptian workforce was employed in farming, although population growth has meant that arable land is still intensively farmed. Cairo, Egypt's capital and largest city, had some 2 million inhabitants by midcentury and 7.6 million in the city proper by 2004. Ninety-four percent of Egyptians are Sunni Muslim, and most of the rest belong to the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church. Although Egypt's major cities had thriving multicultural communities—Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Syrian Christians, and Italians—until the 1950s, those dwindled in the years after the 1952 Revolution and have since largely disappeared.

The years since 1914 saw marked improvements in education and health services in Egypt: literacy rates grew from less than 10 percent to an estimated 58 percent in 2005, and life expectancy more than doubled from thirty-three to sixty-nine years. Efforts at industrialization have helped to diversify the economy away from its early twentieth century dependency on cotton exports, but Egypt remains a relatively poor country, with gross domestic product per capita of $4,400 at purchasing power parity (which adjusts for differences in price levels). Cotton and textiles remain major exports, though in 2005 they are increasingly threatened by competition from Asia. Petroleum products and natural gas are also important exports, and tourism is major source of foreign currency. Since development efforts, especially after 1961, were based on socialist models and included large-scale nationalization of industry, the state has owned much of the economy and played a decisive role in planning; it continues to do so despite some market-oriented reforms in the 1980s and 1990s.

See alsoCold War; Islam; Israel; Palestine; Suez Crisis; Terror.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daly, M. W., and Carl F. Petry, eds. The Cambridge History of Egypt. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999. A useful collection of essays. Vol. 2 covers Egypt since 1517.

Gershoni, Israel, and James P. Jankowski. Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930. New York, 1987. An analysis of the evolution of modern Egyptian national identity.

Hahn, Peter L. The United States, Great Britain and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991. A study of Anglo-American tensions over Egypt in the early postwar years.

Ibrahim, Saad Eddin. Egypt, Islam and Democracy: Critical Essays with a New Postscript. Cairo and New York, 2002. Essays by a prominent Egyptian sociologist, imprisoned between 2000 and 2003 for pro-democracy activism.

Mahfouz, Naguib. The Cairo Trilogy. New York, 2001. Nobel Prize–winning author's epic depiction of life in Cairo from World War I to the 1950s.

Qutb, Sayyid. Milestones. Indianapolis, Ind., 1990. A manifesto of modern Islamic radicalism, written while the author (1903–1966) was awaiting execution in an Egyptian jail.

el-Sadat, Anwar. In Search of Identity: An Autobiography. New York, 1978. Self-serving, as expected from an autobiography of a sitting ruler, but interesting nevertheless for its insight into Sadat's self-image.

Vatikiotis, P. J. The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak. 4th ed. Baltimore, 1991. A standard text, covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Erez Manela