The sixtieth anniversary of the Suez crisis this summer will provide another opportunity for reflection upon the significant amount of scholarship on this transformative and still moving episode. Britain's experience of the crisis has generated a vast literature and its role has been the subject of multiple contentious revisions. Even the smaller literatures on the experiences of France, Israel, and the United States have undergone significant expansion and revision, as a growing body of interpretation and sources has appeared on the scene.Footnote 1 But six decades of study have brought no corresponding transformation in our understanding of the event in Egyptian history. In the story of the Suez crisis, on the one hand, Egypt tends to feature as a monolithic and essentially reactive international actor.Footnote 2 In the comprehensive literature on Egypt in the age of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, on the other, the crisis has generally received only brief attention alongside the many other landmarks of these tumultuous years.Footnote 3 The absence of Egyptian archives and an enduring reliance on accounts provided by official participants has left us with a story of Egypt's role which closely follows the one provided by the Egyptian leadership at the time.Footnote 4 Here, the Suez crisis, as one author recently relayed it, was the moment when President Nasser ‘personally embodied his country's identity’ and ‘acted out its drama of historical agency’ on the world stage, rallying a nationalist resistance against attempted imperialist domination.Footnote 5 This was an action, so we are told by another, which ‘restored the dignity of the individual Arab’ after decades of foreign rule.Footnote 6 In this way, the crisis is conspicuous amidst a contentious historiography; one of the foremost historians of modern Egypt recently concluded that it may be the single episode in Egyptian history ‘about which there is little, if any, dispute’.Footnote 7
This article will take a fresh look at the Suez crisis from the perspective of a number of Egyptians who not only disputed but even actively dissented from such a view. It will suggest that this prevailing narrative has failed to capture the full variety of Egyptian agency in the origins of the Suez crisis, and has obscured the diversity of Egyptian responses to its denouement. It will bring to the foreground a collection of new actors, the figures of what had come to be depicted as a cohesive ‘Egyptian opposition’ by the summer of 1956. For this group of politicians, journalists, businessmen, civil servants, religious activists, military officers, and members of Egypt's royal family in exile, the crisis was a ‘blessed event’, a long-awaited opportunity for which they had been clandestinely planning, and which some had even quite accurately predicted. They therefore attempted to manipulate the international political crisis that resulted from the nationalization of the Suez Canal in order to overthrow the Egyptian regime and establish an alternative political order in the country.
The Suez crisis from the perspective of these ‘other nationalists’ offers an alternative story about the genesis and ultimately the significance of the conflict that took place. Alongside the more popularly known confrontation between Prime Minister Eden and President Nasser – the ‘West's leading colonialist’ versus the ‘Middle East's leading nationalist’Footnote 8 – this article will seek to place the confrontation between Nasser and his Egyptian opponents at the centre of the crisis. The first half of the article will show the extent to which contemporaries considered these two forces to be more evenly matched than has hitherto been assumed, and demonstrate how the widely observed weakness of the Egyptian regime was a central factor in the origins of the crisis that unfolded after July 1956. The second half of the article will investigate the profiles of these figures and the perspectives they held of the event itself. That a collection of sometimes extreme nationalists could come to be ranged against the Arab world's most charismatic national leader, and at least tacitly on the side of Egypt's former imperial ruler, challenges conventional impressions of the range of viable moral assumptions and political commitments in the Arab world of the 1950s. The outcome of this struggle would decide the crisis itself, but it would also influence the direction of Egyptian and Arab nationalism in the years that followed. And while these individuals may not constitute the whole truth of the Suez crisis, they reflect a substantial, a significant, and a neglected one.Footnote 9 Recovering this other dimension of the Suez crisis can go some way toward better conceiving this epoch-making event for Egypt and the broader Middle East.
I
The crisis which culminated in the invasion of Egypt by the forces of Israel, Britain, and France in late October and early November 1956 was precipitated by the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company by President Gamal ‘Abd al NasserFootnote 10 on 26 July and the three months of intense diplomatic activity that followed. In the immediate aftermath of the nationalization, British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden initiated planning for military action against the Egyptian regime, first to make Nasser ‘disgorge his spoils’, and, secondly, to achieve ‘the removal of Nasser and the installation in Egypt of a regime less hostile to the West’.Footnote 11 But the inability of the British armed forces to launch an immediate counter-strike, combined with strong American pressure to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis, resulted in months of multi-party negotiations with the goal of reaching an international agreement for the future of the Canal.Footnote 12 After Nasser rejected any multilateral solution in September, Eden felt increasingly pressured to achieve a result by force, even as the permissive climate for military action receded. The proposal made in October by his French counterpart, Guy Mollet, that a secret agreement be reached with Israel whereby Israeli forces would invade the Sinai, justifying an Anglo-French ‘police action’ to separate the two forces and protect the Canal, resulted in the military campaign that Eden sought, initiated on 1 November.Footnote 13 But this campaign, the ‘Tripartite Aggression’, as it became known in the Arab world, took place in circumstances that few had imagined in July, and with results that even fewer could have foreseen.
In this morass of collusion and intrigue, there has been no shortage of controversies to stir and mysteries to uncover. But the earliest historians of the Suez crisis were particularly preoccupied with the Egyptian dimension of the event, and a central question was whether there had been extensive Egyptian involvement in the war planning process. Most concluded that Britain could only have turned to the rulers of Egypt's pre-1952 ‘ancien regime’ as potential partners in the enterprise, a reliance held to be symptomatic of the backward-looking nature of the enterprise.Footnote 14 All these early historians nonetheless stressed the fragility of the Egyptian regime in the summer of 1956, often to emphasize the extent of Nasser's subsequent popular transformation, and, with it, the depth of Eden's failure.Footnote 15 The historiographical situation was transformed, however, by the memoirs of Anthony Nutting, a junior Foreign Office minister who had resigned over the invasion. Nutting suggested that Anthony Eden ignored widespread Foreign Office concern in the run up to the invasion about the overwhelming popularity of the Egyptian president and absence of any viable opposition movement. Nutting even had Eden explicitly claiming that he did ‘not want an alternative [government]…in Egypt’ and did not ‘give a damn if there [was] anarchy and chaos’ in the country after Nasser's demise.Footnote 16 The memoirs of a number of American secret service agents active in London during the crisis subsequently deepened this impression, suggesting that such irresponsible absence of foresight or even concern had been shared at all levels of the government.Footnote 17
By the early 1990s, however, these issues re-emerged in a public context of renewed interest in Middle Eastern ‘regime change’, and historians began exploring the various candidates intended as potential successors to Nasser who appeared in the newly opened archives. Comprehensive works by Keith Kyle and Scott Lucas implicated a complicated variety of Egyptian ‘successor governments’ waiting in the wings in the summer and autumn of 1956, two of which were internal conspiracies that sought, allegedly with British encouragement, to take advantage of the Suez crisis in order to overthrow the Nasser regime.Footnote 18 Subsequent work by Sue Onslow deepened this picture through highlighting the role of Egypt's exile community in Europe, including elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, and outlined how all these various forces were connected to London.Footnote 19 In the only article so far dedicated to the question of ‘alternatives to Nasser’ in the Suez crisis, Michael Thornhill corrected the impression of multiple and divided Egyptian opposition groups, reaching the striking conclusion that a broad-based and unified successor government had been engaged to take over in post-war Egypt, whose membership was a tribute to the ‘realism’ rather than imperial hubris of British planning.Footnote 20
The increasing body of evidence has implicated a surprisingly broad range of Egyptian participants in the genesis of the Suez invasion, including politicians, journalists, businessmen, civil servants, religious activists, military officers, and members of Egypt's royal family in exile. But studies have nonetheless persisted in treating these figures as isolated and often incongruous individuals, and there has been no attempt to ground them in their domestic political contexts in revolutionary Egypt. They have therefore featured in the story of Suez, even by those who have done so much to rescue them from obscurity, as ‘Western puppets’, ‘British stooges’, self-serving individuals in search of financial gain, or, at best, figures only suitable to a ‘comic opera’.Footnote 21 Here, too, the historical verdict has echoed the one advanced by the Egyptian regime at the time, through a series of show trials of some of these individuals held in Cairo through 1957 to 1959.Footnote 22 There has also been a surprising absence of investigation as to what such a broad collection of figures can tell us about how the crisis looked from Egypt for some of its most significant actors, nor any consideration whether the role these individuals played calls for any wider recasting of the event itself and its place in the history of the modern Middle East. Instead, the conclusions drawn are still solidly national, if not actually ‘nationalist’, with the Suez crisis remaining a simple confrontation between British imperialism and Egyptian nationalism, with the latter personified in the overwhelming force of Egypt's nationalist president.
II
The force of Egyptian nationalism was weighed by British officials at the time, as they debated whether military action could result in successful ‘regime change’ in the Egypt of 1956.Footnote 23 It was agreed at the outset of the planning process that it would be impossible for British forces to assume any form of military or direct rule in Egypt, and that the country must be restored almost directly to Egyptian control. The ability to find significant and able Egyptian partners with credible political followings was therefore a lynchpin to the success of the operation.Footnote 24 The official Foreign Office view was clear from the outset. ‘A large number of formerly prominent and able figures…extremely dissatisfied with the present regime’ would ‘come forward immediately’ following successful British action, the cross-governmental planning committee concluded, and be capable of forming ‘a successor government…able to maintain law and order’.Footnote 25
This confidence reflected the extent to which the Egyptian regime had come to be regarded as fundamentally unstable by an influential section of the political and intelligence community, after four years of post-revolutionary power struggle. The initial army coup d’état in July 1952 by a ‘Free Officers’ group against the unpopular King Farouk, aimed at restoring respect for the constitution, rebuilding the military, and ending the corruption that dogged the Egyptian political system, received significant post-facto popular support. But a small element within this military clique, revolving around Nasser, quickly moved to neutralize and then destroy all other existing political and institutional centres of power, alienating the broader support for the army's supposedly temporary intervention in politics. Egypt's 1923 constitution was abrogated in December 1952, the monarchy abolished in April 1953, and political parties disbanded and then attacked in ‘revolutionary tribunals’ through May to September that year. Shortly afterwards, no political organizations except the officially sanctioned ‘National Liberation Rally’ would be tolerated.Footnote 26
The ruling military group reached crisis in 1954, when, in February, Egypt's first president and the popular hero of the revolution, Brigadier-General Mohammed Naguib, provocatively claimed that his military honour forbade him from presiding over the new state that was being created.Footnote 27 In March, supported by Egypt's former political party organizations, sections of the professional military, and a significant proportion of the middle classes, Naguib attempted to restore Egypt's parliament and constitutional order, and rein in the renegade security services.Footnote 28 But Nasser's supporters in the military and security services isolated loyalist army units and seized control of the capital, quickly derailing Naguib's move. So it was, wrote the Cairo-based French journalist Jean Lacouture, that ‘authoritarian revolution and police-rule…managed to stem the rising flood of freedom’.Footnote 29
After his victory in the March crisis, Nasser moved against Egypt's only remaining mass political organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. An alleged assassination attempt against him on 26 October by a member of the organization provided the regime with the opportunity to initiate a mass assault, in which an estimated 20,000 Muslim Brothers were imprisoned and its principal leaders hanged after a military trial in Cairo.Footnote 30 This victory was coupled with a broadening attack on remaining social and economic power centres. Egypt's media and newspapers had been subdued in April, and were followed in September by purges of the legal profession and the universities, historic bastions of liberal faculty and radical student politics.Footnote 31 In March 1955, the regime committed itself to establishing a socialist society in Egypt that would eradicate class distinctions through the confiscation of property and nationalization of major industries.Footnote 32 A string of foreign policy successes bolstered Nasser's position within the elite and among urban intellectuals through 1955, including his participation in the Bandung Conference, in April, and the Czech Arms Deal, in September.Footnote 33 But this did little to offset the growing atmosphere of political instability and the impact of the struggling economy, which remained the most important test of the government for the public outside Cairo.Footnote 34
It was against this backdrop that the British leadership received a steady stream of intelligence reports through 1955 and 1956 portraying Egypt's new military rulers as dependent upon force alone to stay in power. Egypt was increasingly depicted as a ‘police state’, which ‘held the Egyptian people in submission and resignation…[through] oppression and violence’, while free elections would ‘invariably favour the restoration of constitutional rule’.Footnote 35 Agents emphasized the regime's inability to create a durable governing system, with the new constitution, promulgated in January 1956 and hailed by Egypt's leaders as marking the country's transition to civilian rule, dismissed as the formalization of a ‘military autocracy’ based ‘almost entirely upon the support of the younger officer group’.Footnote 36 Egyptian contacts echoed the view of the intelligence agencies, including through a Free Arab Committee, established to represent the ‘forces of Arab nationalism opposed to…the Cairo–Moscow axis’.Footnote 37 It was a regime, one Egyptian exile wrote to Anthony Eden, likely to ‘end suddenly, either with a serious revolt or a wave of murders’.Footnote 38 In Cairo, Muslim Brotherhood informants of the British embassy suggested that Nasser's position had become ‘similar to that of another dictator…General Shishakli’, the short-lived military ruler of Syria, who in 1956 was a more likely model of the fate of military rulers in the Middle East.Footnote 39
Officials in London were receptive audiences for these scraps of intelligence indicating the shaky tenure of a Middle Eastern leader characterized by his rampantly anti-British rhetoric. But the impression was shared by the much better informed American officials in Egypt, regarding a man they had helped into power just a few years earlier. Diplomatic reports from Cairo frequently complained that the new regime had been unable to generate any popular following or even an effective political organization, and lamented the ‘almost total absence of active support for Nasser among the civilian population’.Footnote 40 The coadunation of the regime's ‘many potential enemies’ was closely monitored; and in major centres such as Alexandria and Port Said diplomats were surprised to be approached not only by members of the general public but by senior government officials seeking to have their anti-government views conveyed to Washington.Footnote 41 The governor of Port Said, Mohamed Riad, for example, confided his impression to the American consul general that the regime did not ‘dare to grant any freedoms [since] it would be quickly overthrown’.Footnote 42 As late as June 1956, against the backdrop of Nasser's acclaimed foreign policy achievements on the world stage, informants poured scorn on their president's international rhetoric of restoring Egypt's national dignity, ‘when all twenty-two million of us [Egyptians] live in a huge concentration camp’.Footnote 43 The United States therefore had no interest, Riad attempted to persuade his American contacts, in prolonging the ‘present regime's’ life.Footnote 44
While by early 1956 US officials in Egypt and in Washington had come to regard the Nasser government as a ‘military junta dictatorship’, they did not perceive its collapse to be imminent, as was suggested by Britain's Egyptian informants.Footnote 45 With political power in the new Egypt based in the police and the military, American agents argued that the regime's control of these forces and its advanced intelligence apparatus would keep it secure from domestic uprisings or any attempted ‘civilian coup’. The ‘façade’ of security could be maintained, they suggested, as long as an externally induced crisis did not develop which would give the regime's enemies an opening.Footnote 46 For the United States’ European partners, more willing to countenance causing just such a crisis, quite different conclusions were reached from the intelligence. A month before the nationalization, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau passed on a message to his British counterpart Selwyn Lloyd. ‘Since the Nasser regime [is] weak’ and ‘would not be difficult to get rid of’, he asked, ‘was it not, perhaps, time for France and Britain to take some common action’ in the Middle East?Footnote 47
The nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July did little to alter this prevailing impression, and a lot to deepen it. The initial decision to nationalize the Canal had been taken by Nasser personally in response to the public withdrawal of financial support for the construction of Egypt's planned Aswan Dam by the United States, which he perceived as an ‘invitation to the people of Egypt’ to bring down his regime.Footnote 48 There seemed to be significant apprehension that the invitation would be taken up. In Cairo, Jean Lacouture recalled that a ‘list of names for a Naguib government was already being passed around’ in anticipation of the fast approaching end of Nasser's political career.Footnote 49 The origins of the act of nationalization were, in this respect, as much a step in a process of domestic regime consolidation as a ‘true expression’ of Egypt's struggle to ‘secure full national freedom’.Footnote 50 The way in which the decision had been taken, moreover, immediately alienated the army leadership. Field Marshal ‘Abd al Hakim ‘Amr had opposed the idea when it had first been broached in discussion and favoured more gradual pressure against the Suez Canal Company. Nasser had therefore concealed his intentions from ‘Amr and only informed him in Alexandria on the day before the public announcement, leaving his top military commander and minister of defence outraged.Footnote 51
Jubilant crowds ‘erupting in wild enthusiasm’ at Nasser's dramatic announcement of the nationalization at a speech in Alexandria have become a staple of the historiographical tradition.Footnote 52 Journalists in Egypt's government-controlled newspapers set the tone that later authors would follow, depicting some ‘22 million Egyptians…unified as one heart, one mind, and one will…[in the] name of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’.Footnote 53 But British diplomatic reports from Cairo, even from the most sympathetic embassy officials, described the mood quite differently. The pervasive sense was one of ‘apathy and concern’ and there were reportedly few ‘signs of enthusiasm for Nasser and his policies’ in the weeks that followed. Friendly Arab diplomats in Egypt, meanwhile, drew London's attention to the surprisingly broad opposition to the move discovered in the capital.Footnote 54 The aggressive tone of the announcement and act of nationalization alienated many who otherwise shared the desire to assert Egyptian sovereignty over the Canal, which was scheduled anyway to revert to Egypt in twelve years.Footnote 55 Elements within the military, including army, naval, and air-force officers, went further than their field marshal in expressing more open dissent at an act of brinkmanship likely to involve Egypt in an international conflict for which it was little prepared.Footnote 56 Some officers even clandestinely contacted the British ambassador with the request that the opposition of the armed forces to the nationalization be conveyed to London.Footnote 57 The seriousness of the international reaction emboldened Nasser's opponents in Egypt, ‘minorities, old political parties, the majority of the professional middle classes’, to speak ‘more freely against the regime than usual’.Footnote 58 Some thus welcomed the nationalization for entirely different reasons. It was ‘at last a move in the right direction’, wrote a member of Egypt's banned nationalist Wafd party, only because it had finally alerted the international community to the threat that Nasser's regime posed. The expected international response would, he said, ‘encourage all the good elements, not only in Egypt but also in the Middle East’.Footnote 59
The American position moved significantly closer to the European one in the months following the nationalization, even as the administration actively attempted to thwart Anglo-French enthusiasm for a military invasion. By the spring of 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had come to speak openly of his fear that he would ‘wake up some morning and find that Egypt…had slipped behind the Iron Curtain’. Following the seizure of the Canal, he was adamant that Nasser could ‘not be allowed to succeed’, since, as he told his cabinet, Europe could not ‘remain at the mercy of the whim of a dictator’.Footnote 60 In consequence, in the midst of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's Suez peace diplomacy, Eisenhower commissioned a new covert operation in August designed to bring about the ‘disposal’ of Nasser ‘as quickly as possible’ in collaboration with his British allies.Footnote 61 The programme would weaken Nasser's position internationally and then ‘use covert means to mobilize the necessary internal political opposition to bring about his actual removal’.Footnote 62 The prospect of an international conflict in the Middle East to bring down the Egyptian regime was not simply unprincipled in the American view, it was unnecessary.Footnote 63 Nasser of Egypt could in 1957 go the same way as Mohammad Mossaddeq of Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954.
As these plans were finalized through the summer of 1956, officials in Western capitals were optimistic in their assessment of the range and the size of the groups lined up against Nasser's regime. These included significant elements of Egypt's middle classes, ranging from the large number of government workers, particularly in the Ministry of Interior and the Foreign Ministry, who resented the military's encroachment into their bureaucratic terrains, to students and intellectuals who resented the strictures of military rule. The business community was dissatisfied at the regime's mismanagement of the economy, especially the many smaller business owners, merchants, and shopkeepers concerned by the move toward socialism and the Soviet Union.Footnote 64 Those dissatisfied with the regime also included sections of the military, particularly the thousands of officers in forced retirement, many of whom had drifted back to Egypt's former political parties.Footnote 65 Even Egypt's majority fellahin population in the rural areas could not be counted as a reliable source of support by 1956.Footnote 66 The early land reforms of November 1952 had had a limited impact on the countryside, and even the few new peasant landholders who had benefited from them had reportedly come to blame Nasser for the collapsing value of their recently acquired lands.Footnote 67 The poorest among Egypt's peasantry remained under the influence of the entrenched rural families of the old regime, almost all of which were regarded as Wafdists.Footnote 68 In common with Nasser's early international moves of 1955, the Suez crisis ‘hardly touched Egypt's forgotten men’, in large sections of the country where clan and geographical loyalties were ‘still stronger than the allegiance to an imagined “Egypt”’.Footnote 69 Not all of these alienated groups would easily translate their dissent into support for a military campaign against their country's ruler. Many would rally around Nasser as the Suez crisis unfolded and the threat of an external attack deepened, on the logic of ‘my country, right or wrong’, as one partisan observer complained.Footnote 70 But it was this prevailing domestic situation in Egypt that led British officials to believe that the regime could be successfully replaced and that military action was therefore a realistic option. And it was in this context that Egypt's opposition figures operated, justifying their claims to be speaking for broad national constituencies which suffered under the regime, and the drastic steps they were prepared to take to end it.
In spite of the broad expectation of extensive Egyptian political support for changing the regime, no blueprint emerged in British planning during the Suez crisis detailing who exactly would be installed in Cairo in the aftermath of an intervention. By contrast, the identification of a new Egyptian government was expressly forbidden on political and strategic grounds, in concern that leaked proposals could compromise any candidate seen to receive British backing, but also since Eden and his advisers sensed that it had so many options there was no need to limit its ability to respond to events developing on the ground.Footnote 71 Orders were accordingly circulated that briefings on the subject of Britain's post-war political partners be delivered orally; there were to be ‘no names…No pack drill.’Footnote 72 This policy has succeeded in thwarting comprehensive study of this most covert feature of the Suez crisis, and must rank alongside the episode's other infamous acts of obfuscation, such as Eden's order to destroy the ‘Protocol of Sevres’, or the pressure he successfully exerted upon Harold Macmillan to destroy his diary entries for the period of the crisis.Footnote 73 The secrecy also masked the fact that the Foreign Office itself had poor intelligence on the intricacies of Egyptian politics by 1956, and was significantly distrusted by many opponents of the regime owing to Eden's earlier attempt as foreign secretary to befriend Nasser in the run-up to the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1954.Footnote 74 This enabled maverick political operators with extensive personal contacts in the Middle East, such as the Conservative member of parliament Julian Amery, to play decisive roles in connecting Egypt's opposition forces with London policy-makers and intelligence operatives, a factor which has caught the imagination of a number of scholars.Footnote 75 But the immediate practical consequence of this somewhat cavalier British policy, and one that had seemed to work in Iran in 1953, was to increase the autonomy of the Egyptian actors involved.Footnote 76 Having assured London that they were ready to move if Britain intervened, Egyptian opposition and dissident figures were given free reign to set out the basis of the successor regime and who among them should lead it. These other Egyptian nationalists would not be ‘installed’ in a foreign invasion; they would seize the opportunity presented by the international crisis to rise from the ashes of Nasser's failed experiment.
III
The forces of political opposition in Egypt were more united by the time of nationalization than they had been on any previous occasion. In Cairo, American agents had begun to speak for the first time of an Egyptian ‘opposition coalition’, and expressed their surprise to start hearing the same clandestine anti-regime programme independently confided to them by officials from the Wafd party, junior army officers, and Muslim Brothers.Footnote 77 In contrast to the conventional impression that anti-government forces had been broken in 1954 and were negligible thereafter, 1955 marks a pivotal year in the regrouping and resurgence of a range of formerly prominent political organizations and individuals.Footnote 78 The regime's domestic failure to establish a secure popular base, the threat of external tensions with Israel and its faltering relationship with the United States raised expectations for a coming crisis and led to a shift in activity among opposition forces. Throughout 1954, after their failure in the March crisis, dissident political leaders had refrained from clandestine activity for fear of provoking new measures against their struggling organizations. But the chance perceived by early 1955 that the regime would be overcome by its domestic and international contradictions led the opposition to attempt to solidify its position, including broadening contact with discontented army officers and within the police forces, and strengthening connections with the Muslim Brotherhood's secondary leadership cadres who had avoided imprisonment in the sweeps of the previous year.Footnote 79 Early in 1956, representatives of the opposition sent word to Eisenhower and Eden to inform them that the anti-Nasser forces ‘no longer think in terms of partisan politics or interests’.Footnote 80 ‘Unlike the Bourbons’, the British foreign secretary was informed, the Egyptian opposition had ‘learned from experience’.Footnote 81
The Muslim Brotherhood had marked a steady recovery from the low point of the execution of its senior leadership in December 1954, and American officials estimated that the movement had retained as many as one million members and close sympathizers by April 1955.Footnote 82 The regime had ‘failed in its attempt to destroy the Brotherhood’, and its slow but steady regrouping was reflected in successive mass arrests of Brotherhood cells that were proliferating throughout the country.Footnote 83 Cadres engaged in a range of activities designed to signal to the public that the organization was still alive, such as fundraising for the families of imprisoned Brothers. A more radical strand of the movement turned to more direct action, and by the summer had begun building up illicit weapons dumps in the provinces, using funds directed from the organization's vast and highly connected exile community in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.Footnote 84 Their strength returning, the Brothers expressed confidence that the regime's ‘days were numbered’. And when Nasser reportedly approached a series of Wafdist and Brotherhood figures in late 1955 in an attempt to reconcile them with the regime and gain the support of their followings, he was defiantly rebuffed by all of them.Footnote 85
The Egyptian opposition underwent a second transformative shift in its strategy in the six months after January 1956, however, mirroring the hardening of views taking place internationally.Footnote 86 Throughout 1955 even the most hawkish among Egypt's political dissidents had been unable to countenance direct foreign action on their behalf, arguing that the regime must ‘be allowed to die a natural death’ which would spare Egypt the ‘chaotic and violent events’ of an international intervention.Footnote 87 But all were apparently caught by surprise when Nasser introduced the constitution of the following January and feigned achievement of his earlier commitment to transfer to civilian rule. Suddenly realizing that the ‘coup-proof’ military regime had no plans to open the political system, and could conceivably hold power indefinitely, Egypt's former political classes faced the prospect of a lifetime underground, in exile, or in prison. Like many dissident groups before them, they turned to outside patrons, and the prospect of external force, as the only way to recapture the apparatus of the state.
At the forefront of the Egyptian forces that moved to collaborate in such a move by the summer of 1956 were three men who could each lay claim to significant mass-mobilizing power and formidable track records of nationalist politics. Mohammed Naguib and Mustafa al Nahhas were identified by the regime at the time as the primary domestic figureheads around which opposition might have crystallized during the Suez crisis, while the role of the third, Hassan al Hudaybi, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, remains opaque and unexplored.Footnote 88 All three signalled to London, in some cases directly and some indirectly, their hope for an intervention that could overthrow Nasser's government, and their willingness to serve in the government that would follow. General Naguib (1901–84) was the popular hero of the July 1952 revolution. As the only senior general among the Free Officers movement, and a widely regarded war hero and defender of the armed forces against the Palace, his support had been central to its initial success. During his almost two years in power he subsequently presided over the deconstruction of significant elements of Egypt's old political order.Footnote 89 But by the time of the Suez crisis, after almost eighteen months' imprisonment, Naguib had turned into a vehement critic of ‘what the July Revolution was doing to Egypt’.Footnote 90 Even in confinement, Naguib's enduring popular profile in Egypt and his personal authority in the army made him a dangerous figure, and in spite of Nasser's personal antipathy to the old general, the regime attempted to reconcile with Naguib in 1955 as part of their broader effort to gain public support. Even after a year in the violent and often humiliating circumstances of his detention, however, Naguib's response was uncompromising; he would ‘never return to public life’ unless Nasser ‘permitted civilians to re-establish a freely elected parliamentary regime’.Footnote 91 By the following June, a month before the nationalization, the Wafd reported to London and Washington that an understanding between him and Mustafa al Nahhas had been reached about co-operation in any transitional regime. An emissary of the party reported to London that the Wafd and their partners would ‘forget their parties and support a National Union government, formed by…Naguib’, a man who ‘could rally around him all the army and the whole nation’.Footnote 92
Naguib's new political partner in the opposition, Mustafa al Nahhas (1879–1965), was a five times former prime minister who, among his many political achievements, had negotiated Egypt's independence from Great Britain in 1936, and was the most famous politician of its parliamentary order, the successor to the renowned ‘father of the Egyptian nation’ Saad Zaghoul. Nahhas had cautiously greeted the army's intervention into politics in 1952, welcoming the dismissal of the unpopular King Farouk, expecting that the July movement would ultimately deepen the political power of his nationalist party.Footnote 93 But the new military leadership's subsequent abrogation of the constitution, which Nahhas described as ‘Egypt's Magna Carta’, followed by its dissolution of political parties turned him into a belligerent adversary.Footnote 94 In the crisis of 1954, Nahhas had publicly sided with Naguib and denounced Nasser's rule in public rallies, leading to his detention and ban from political life.Footnote 95
The conditions of Nahhas's detention were gentler than Naguib's, reflecting a certain wariness by the military regime of treating the grand old man of the Egyptian nationalist movement too badly, and he was able to maintain contact with the Wafdist party organization throughout 1954–6 via sympathetic prison guards and through members of his extended family.Footnote 96 In these two years, the Wafd became again, as it had been during the times of royal autocracy, a ‘symbol of suspended freedom’, and was perceived to remain the strongest electoral force in Egypt in 1956.Footnote 97 But with the prospect of elections receding, Nahhas's emissaries conveyed to their contacts in the British government that in the current circumstances Egypt's ‘salvation’ would be ‘impossible without external intervention’.Footnote 98 Nahhas was an old man by the time of the Suez crisis and was reportedly uninterested in personally assuming power except as a titular ‘chief of state’. But he was eager to ‘redeem his reputation…even through an act of sacrifice’, and he envisaged being broken out of his house arrest and dramatically appearing at Friday prayers at one of Cairo's large mosques, to initiate mass demonstrations.Footnote 99 He was perceived by friends and enemies alike to retain a potentially decisive personal influence and popular power as Egypt's senior statesman, which he placed in the service of the international effort to overthrow the military regime.
The third of Egypt's senior political figures within the opposition coalition, Hassan al Hudaybi (1891–1973), had led the Muslim Brotherhood for six years, the successor to its assassinated founder Hassan al Banna. Like his two new political allies, Hudaybi had also been on the side of the movement to overthrow the king in July 1952, in the belief that a reformed Egyptian leadership could stand up more effectively to Great Britain in the stalled negotiations over the Sudan and the Suez Canal.Footnote 100 But the Brotherhood dramatically fell out with the regime in 1954, when Hudaybi accused Nasser of creating a ‘military dictatorship…to replace the tyranny of Farouk’, and embarking upon a valiant lone public campaign against the regime in the six months following the March crisis, he was finally arrested, imprisoned, and initially sentenced to death in December 1954.Footnote 101
In the vibrant community of Muslim Brothers in Egypt's prisons, Hudaybi maintained a significant communication network and retained some direction over cadres on the outside.Footnote 102 In early 1955, he set out a policy of no compromise with Egypt's military leadership, while expressing optimism that their hanging of the devout Muslims and nationalists among the Brotherhood's leaders had ‘strengthened the bonds of Arab nationalism’ and ‘brought the Movement's aims…ten years closer’ by revealing the ‘brutal dictatorship’ for what it was.Footnote 103 Active officials such as Said Ramadan (1926–95) propagated this message abroad through the party's vast international networks in the Middle East and in its European centres in Munich, Geneva, and Paris.Footnote 104 As the Suez crisis unfolded in July and August, Hudaybi's personal role was pivotal in corralling the movement to co-operate with the expected intervention. While some younger Brothers moved to support Nasser as the crisis deepened, other members of the movement in the circle around Sayyid Qutb rejected any appeals to national solidarity at all, portraying Nasser as an apostate jahili leader who constituted the most immediate enemy for the movement and believers, without regard to the alignments of any foreign powers.Footnote 105 In the middle of this spectrum of Brotherhood thought, the Supreme Guide and the leadership council maintained Hudaybi's earlier Egyptian nationalist stance, working to prevent members from signalling any support for the Egyptian president and instructing its officials in exile to participate in meetings with British officials in Geneva and Paris to plan for the operation.Footnote 106
The links between these three figureheads of the opposition in Egypt and their international partners were provided by members of the burgeoning Egyptian exiles community spread across Europe and the Middle East, who remained one of the regime's most enduring security concerns in the early years. The newspaper proprietor and former politician, Mahmoud Abu al Fath (1885–1958), and his brother, Ahmed Abul Fath (1917–2004), were the most prominent of Egypt's political émigrés by 1956. Mahmoud was a largely self-made journalist who in 1936 established a national newspaper, Al Misri, which soon challenged Al Ahram for the position of Egypt's leading daily.Footnote 107 His charisma and media power led to seats in the chamber of deputies and the senate by the late 1940s, and a reputation as the ‘Wafd's Beaverbrook’.Footnote 108Al Misri's status as the mouthpiece of an extreme anti-British policy led the Abul Faths to be embraced by the new military rulers, and Ahmed, a leader of the Wafd's youth movement, became a political adviser to Nasser in his first months in power.Footnote 109 But the brothers' confidence in the regime quickly subsided as it became clear that the Free Officers had little desire either to restore the constitution or to tolerate a free press.Footnote 110 They threw their weight behind Hudaybi and the Muslim Brotherhood after the defeat of the political parties in the March crisis, but found their newspaper the first target in the Egyptian media. Mahmoud and another brother Hussein Abul Fath were convicted in absentia by a military tribunal to lengthy terms in prison, the confiscation of their assets, and revocation of their Egyptian nationality.Footnote 111
In their years of exile after 1954, the Abul Faths led a sustained public relations campaign against the Nasser regime, and Ahmed was identified by late 1955 as one of the most prominent candidates in exile tipped for service in a restored civilian government.Footnote 112 Mahmoud meanwhile established himself as the ‘chief representative’ of Nahas in foreign capitals, well known among the British and French leaderships.Footnote 113 Old and increasingly unwell by the point of the crisis, Mahmoud maintained an exhausting schedule of travelling among the many scattered groups of Egyptian exiles and their political supporters across Europe, a regimen broken only by intermittent bouts of recuperation in the health spas of southern Germany. His writings provided a constant counter-narrative to the regime in Cairo on the international stage, and provide the clearest statement of the constitutional views that brought together the Egyptian opposition in 1956.
While the Mahmoud Abul Fath served as a publicist and emissary for the exiled anti-Nasser forces, Prince ‘Amr Ibrahim (1902–77), a senior member of Egypt's royal family in exile, and Ahmed Mortada al Maraghi (1909–81), a political administrator and former long-serving governor of Alexandria, provided the institutional and financial resources that would underpin the opposition efforts at their restoration. Alone among their new political coalition partners, both the prince, who had a background in the air force, and Maraghi, who had a reputation as an ‘iron-fisted’ security man after his service as minister of interior in the short-lived governments that followed the burning of Cairo in January 1952, had opposed the July coup from the outset.Footnote 114 Ibrahim had immediately entered the political fray in Cairo in an attempt to limit the damage, pressuring his cousin Prince Mohamed ‘Abd al Moneim to use his position in the short-lived regency council to expand links with loyalist military officers. After the council was abolished and the regime began to move against the political parties, Ibrahim escaped abroad to join the growing exile community in Switzerland, after he was informed that his name had appeared on a regime blacklist. In the following years, his Montreux villa became a node in a wide network of contacts among Egyptian political figures and European government officials. Maraghi remained in Cairo, where he reconciled with the Wafd and struggled to maintain what contacts he could in the police and security forces, until suddenly leaving Egypt in June 1956 and setting up court in Beirut.Footnote 115 As the crisis unfolded, Ibrahim was the principal European contact with Maraghi, who, a long-standing loyalist to the Egyptian royal family, acted as Ibrahim's agent in meetings in the Middle East and Europe. From Switzerland, and via his friendship with Fath and Amery, Ibrahim facilitated the meetings between Egyptian opposition officials and representatives of Britain and France, pressing upon both governments the urgency of action in the aftermath of the crisis.Footnote 116
Naguib, Nahhas, and Hudaybi in Egypt, and the Faths, Ibrahim, Maraghi, and Muslim Brotherhood officials such as Said Ramadan in exile, were just the most prominent of a much larger number who became entangled in the operation in 1956. Other known sympathizers and likely collaborators were Dr Mohamed Salah al Din, the foreign minister of the last Wafd government, known as an extreme nationalist and one of the ‘most brilliant’ and ‘most dangerous men in the Middle East’ andFootnote 117 ‘Abd al Fattah Hassan, a former Wafdist minister and ally of the party chairman Fuad Serraj al Din, himself just released from prison months before the nationalization and who had immediately returned to anti-government plotting. They also included Rashad Mehanna, one of the original Free Officers and a member of the regency council, who by 1956 was being held in a desert military base for plotting a coup in 1953. There were also many less prominent figures among the 100 military officers and civil servants subsequently arrested for conspiracy during the crisis, who reflected just a portion of the sympathy the Wafd held among powerful civilian figures who still served in key positions in the Egyptian state.Footnote 118 The world may have been ‘preoccupied with the possibilities of war and chaos in the Middle East’ through the months of the Suez crisis, as Mahmoud Abu al Fath put it in an open letter to an ‘American friend’, but ‘Egyptians had a different view’. For them, the Suez crisis was ‘an unexpected and blessed event…which might cause their liberation from Nasser's dictatorship and save the Arab world from communism’, and ‘banish the Free Officers to the obscurity that they deserve’.Footnote 119
IV
In the months of crisis, this broad collection of Egyptians, spread throughout Egypt, Europe, and the Middle East, activated communication networks and hosted clandestine planning sessions to prepare for the impending invasion and to ensure that it would result in the realization of their vision for a new Egypt. The influence wielded by Abul Fath, Ibrahim, Maraghi, and Hudaybi and his Muslim Brotherhood officials, via their British acquaintances and the secret services, reassured the British leadership in its expectation that it would find capable allies on the ground, a precondition for the military operation to go ahead. But we remain considerably in the dark as to what happened in those crucial summer months of positioning between July and October, at a time when the prospects of invasion gradually receded, and there was a marked decline in faith in the British leadership's resolve and corresponding hesitancy in becoming exposed too soon.Footnote 120
The critical eight days of conflict that eventually followed occurred in a context that few among the opposition had expected, following a surprise attack by Israel. This changed the game for some participants, as it did for many earlier British advocates of military action, who considered such collaboration with Israel, and even with the French, as placing the British intervention beyond the limits of what Arab nationalist politics could bear. But by no means were all of Britain's Egyptian partners deterred. Some had predicted just such an Israeli military action to be a viable opportunity for a move against the regime, in the expectation that it would result in the kind of swift military debacle that was ultimately to transpire in the Sinai.Footnote 121 When the Anglo-French military action began on 1 November, as allied forces began an air campaign against strategic military targets, while Israeli forces completed their capture of the Sinai peninsula, we can find glimpses of the opposition forces moving into action as they had planned throughout the summer. Maraghi flew from his base in Beirut to Rome, preparing to cross to Alexandria, his former power-base and one of the regime's weakest points, when Nasser appeared to be on the brink of collapse.Footnote 122 Tracking the chaos unfolding in Cairo on the night of 1 November, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, telephoned his brother, the secretary of state John Foster Dulles, to inform him that this was imminent: Nasser was ‘on the ropes’ and ‘toppling’.Footnote 123
The following day, on 2 November, with Cairo under a military lock-down, dissident military officials visited Mohammed Salah al Din and ‘Abd al Fattah Hassan, to secure their agreement to places in a successor cabinet that would gather in the coming days.Footnote 124 Meanwhile, under instructions from the Supreme Guide, the Muslim Brotherhood activated its international network in order to facilitate successful Anglo-French military action. In Syria and the Gulf states, Brotherhood operatives were instructed to ‘prevent any sabotage of British facilities’ that was being encouraged by Nasserist sympathizers in those countries, so as to help the invasion move swiftly toward its objective.Footnote 125 While Naguib was bundled on to a train by military police and sent on a gruelling forty-eight-hour journey into the desert, his emissaries visited the commander in chief of the Egyptian Army, ‘Abd al Hakim ‘Amer, demanding that Nasser stand down and have Egypt's first president restored for the good of the country.Footnote 126
In the initial panic, several among Nasser's circle pressured him to accept the offer. ‘Amer, the second most powerful man in the country, told the assembled cabinet that his ‘conscience would not allow [him] to subject the Egyptian people to the carnage’ of the destruction of their army and the economy, in defence of a decision that he had opposed from the outset as ill-advised brinkmanship. To insist on fighting would ‘set [Egypt] back one thousand years’.Footnote 127 Salah Salem, the minister of information, argued that Nasser had ‘done his best’ but now must ‘do one more service for Egypt…hand himself in’.Footnote 128 ‘We have not built the revolution’, he said, ‘to subject the country to ruin.’Footnote 129 In fact, the majority of the revolutionary council came out in favour of conceding power. But after an apparently momentary hesitation, Nasser was unswayed.Footnote 130 In keeping with an act that had always been about his survival in power, he moved to organize a guerilla war able to assassinate any Egyptian opposition leaders who might emerge to contest his place as president. The ‘Hero of the Arab Nation’ intended, as he had earlier graphically warned British officials, to ‘pull the temple down’ and ‘bury himself and everyone else in the ruins’ rather than relinquish power: if any further delegations should appear to urge him to compromise, he ordered that they be ‘shot on the spot in the presidency garden’.Footnote 131 In a ‘state of near hysteria’ before his assembled cabinet, his intelligence chief Salah Nasr later wrote, with a sense for irony, it was Nasser himself who ‘recalled the end of Hitler and his henchmen’ as he began arranging for potassium cyanide to be distributed to his colleagues to ensure that they would ‘commit suicide as an alternative to surrender’.Footnote 132
But Nasser did not have the chance to live up to his threat of an Egyptian ‘Götterdämmerung’.Footnote 133 The expected Anglo-French invasion did not materialize, and the anti-government protests that opposition members had hoped would erupt following an international move did not occur, as world support started to pour out for the Egyptian president, and while significant sections of the armed forces were withdrawn to garrison Egypt's towns and cities, with planes strafing Alexandria's beaches and militia encampments surrounding the city.Footnote 134 With internal security forces under Nasser's control, and Naguib, Nahhas, and Hudaybi still detained and unable to appear in Cairo to rally the population against the president as their military supporters had envisaged, the agents of the opposition waited for expected collapse of the army in the Canal Zone.Footnote 135
When the landing force arrived, on 5 November, following days of crippling international condemnation and financial pressure as the armada-like force sailed from Malta, Nasser's diplomatic victory had already been won. As Port Said was captured and the Anglo-French forces advanced south along the Canal toward al Qantarah on 6 November, Eden called a sudden cease-fire, under mounting American pressure.Footnote 136 The response of his Egyptian allies was disbelief and then despair, and having risked so much already they exhorted in vain for action to continue. In the months that followed, and even as Eden departed the scene for his Jamaica recuperation, they urged the pressure to be kept up, sensing some advantage as Nasser struggled to explain the resounding military defeat suffered by a regime whose earliest claim to power had been based upon its restoration of the army. The Muslim Brotherhood's European-based leaders were ‘disappointed and flabbergasted’ by the United States' demand that they unilaterally withdraw their forces before the objective was achieved, and urged their British partners not to surrender. The ‘invading troops [must] continue the occupation’, the Brotherhood's émigré leader stressed, to make ‘opinion in the Arab world…realise the extent of the defeat…that Nasser [has] brought on them’. With the Sinai occupied by Israel and Port Said reoccupied by Great Britain and France, this was a predicament without precedent in modern Egyptian history.Footnote 137 Elements in the Alexandria army and administration would also convey their dismay to American officials at their country's ‘deplorable action’ in ‘not letting the British and French proceed with their strategy’.Footnote 138 But these appeals could hardly hope to sway officials in London, whose earlier emancipatory aspirations for Egypt swiftly collapsed in the face of the strategic and public disaster they had contrived. Neither sympathy for their cause nor much sense of concern for the fate to which he abandoned them appeared in Eden's later accounting of the diplomacy of the Suez crisis.Footnote 139
V
It is one of the dilemmas of international history that the ‘diplomatic historian’s short-hand’Footnote 140 of the nation-state can over-influence our expectations for the dynamics of the encounters and even conflicts between them. Nowhere is this more widely found than in the history of the decline and break-up of Europe’s overseas empires after 1945, where the remarkable rise of anti-colonial nationalism dominates interpretation. But nowhere is it also more prone to mislead. In this revolutionary era, new nations’ nationalisms could still be associated with ideologies, institutions, and even territorial boundaries quite distinct from those of the particular nationalist leaders who would ultimately succeed. The position of the Egyptian opposition during the Suez crisis is a testament to this dilemma. The roles played by its members challenges the tendency to view the crisis as a Manichean conflict between two clearly drawn national antagonists. Just as many in Britain found themselves more closely aligned with the Egyptian president in the international conflict that developed than with their own prime minister, so we must concede that many Egyptians might have felt closer to Anthony Eden.
But the profiles of these dissident forces also challenge the view that the invasion represented a reactionary episode in the colonial domination of Egypt, and its familiar corollary that these figures can be dismissed as stooges or puppets of imperialism. In fact, bringing Britain's Egyptian ‘allies’ in the Suez crisis into closer focus confirms Michael Thornhill's conclusion about the realism of British planning. Rather than ill-informed and arrogant imperial hubris, the planning reflected some awareness of the changed world in which British officials found themselves, and even a pragmatic consideration of their options as they ultimately began conspiring to invade Egypt to support the emergence of what many predicted would be an ‘extreme nationalist’ government.Footnote 141 Whatever the make-up of the new regime, officials in London recognized that it could not be expected to restore the Suez Canal to British control, in spite of the dreams of the more hard-line associates of Julian Amery. Difficult negotiations were expected to take place even following the military defeat of Nasser and emergence of a new regime.Footnote 142 While the military operation itself may have harked back to older imperial ventures, as both Eisenhower and Dulles complained, the political dynamics were more in keeping with contemporary Cold War interventions than either was ready to admit.Footnote 143
That such a variety of nationalists should appear in what appears to be such a counter-intuitive position in the Suez crisis underlines the need for a more sensitive approach to the forces of nationalism in the Middle East in the 1950s. The role of nationalism is often introduced to narratives of Suez only to explain why the attempt to overthrow Nasser was foredoomed to failure. The ‘epitaph’ of the crisis is the British leadership's ‘fatal misjudgment’ of nationalism.Footnote 144 The Egyptian opposition, however, was made up of ardent nationalists, many with significant track records of vehemently and sometimes violently defending the national interests of their country against those they perceived to be threatening them. The language of the age of independence can often lead to an irresistible ascription of roles; an individual who would oppose something so universally depicted as a landmark in Egypt's struggle for independence and national dignity is almost unthinkable. But the significance of the terms could vary profoundly, and the Egyptian opposition's efforts during the crisis reflect how many Egyptians viewed the political practices of ‘Nasser's New Egypt’ not as the culmination of a long-standing search for sovereignty, struggle for national independence, or the ‘Arab people's long standing desire for dignity’,Footnote 145 but as a system wholly out of keeping with Egypt's established practice of political pluralism, inherited institutions, and emerging place in the post-war world order.
In making their bid for power in the Suez crisis in 1956, all the elements that made up the Egyptian opposition were also in search of an independent, sovereign, and nationalist Egyptian state able to play a prominent role in world affairs. But where Nasser's followers called for the ‘severing’ of the Egyptian people's ‘ties with their past’ and acted, as Manfred Halpern evocatively put it, ‘as if they had no ancestors’,Footnote 146 the opposition placed itself within the tradition of Egypt's many decades of nationalist struggle, dating back to the ‘lost Khedive’ Abbas II, Mohammed Farid, and Mustafa Kamil, and culminating in Zaghoul and Nahhas, and they sought to preserve the constitution, legal system, and parliamentary order whose emergence it had fostered.Footnote 147 Even Hassan al Hudaybi, leader of a movement whose rise is often regarded as signalling the decay of parliamentary politics in post-war Egypt, committed himself to the establishment of a ‘stable, democratic regime’ in the country, in which his movement would play the role of the ‘official opposition’. All ‘modern countries’ must be governed through elected bodies, he wrote in a 1954 pamphlet, and while Egypt's parliament had failed in the past ‘this was no excuse for discarding the principle…[since] learning comes from actual practice in parliamentary life’.Footnote 148 The restoration of civilian and parliamentary rule as a central component of Egyptian nationalism brought together diverse former foes: from restive military officers who wanted to expand the army as a professional rather than a political fighting force, to radical Wafdist youth leaders, who still identified Egypt with Europe, and regarded the continent's leftist parliamentary parties as models for social democratic politics in the Middle East.
The opposition's nationalist Egypt also included the country's older political institutions, those which pre-dated the relatively short-lived era of British rule. Even the traditionally republican-sympathizing Wafdists had come by 1956 to find new ideological appeal in the Egyptian throne, contending that there was no culture of the ‘republican form of government…[or] presidential system in Egypt or the Middle East’, so that its maintenance would always result in the kind of ‘absolute personal rule’ they abhorred in Nasser. The monarchy was the ‘only other institution [with] a tradition in Egypt’, which offered an anchor of stability preferable to the ‘enforced stability of a military regime’.Footnote 149 The restoration also seemed to offer a last chance to recover the other component of Egypt's nationalist struggle for sovereignty: its historic union with the Sudan, a country which a long succession of Egyptian nationalists had claimed, as Mohammed Salah al Din put it, was more ‘essential to Egypt…than Alexandria’.Footnote 150 The promise of a breakthrough in negotiations over the Sudan had, in Nasser's own account, been a central ‘aid of the revolution’, and the revolutionary government's subsequent ‘surrender’ of Sudan to full independence in January 1956 constituted for many the most grievous of his regime's failures in Egypt's external affairs.Footnote 151 The return of the Egyptian monarchy and its attendant shade of Greater Egypt nationalism could be expected to reopen the challenges of a Cairo foreign policy that faced south, toward the ‘Unity of the Nile Valley’, rather than eastward and toward the republican unity of the Arab world.
There was nothing inevitable, in this way, that the assertion of Egypt's national sovereignty and dignity on the international stage would require the external alignments that were increasingly foreshadowed in Nasser's diplomacy by 1956, and deepened in the decade that followed. Many of the civil servants, military officers and the more senior of the politicians involved in the opposition advocated a shift in Egypt's foreign relations toward closer and more amicable relations with the West. There was widespread apprehension that in barely two years Nasser had succeeded in ‘completely isolat[ing] Egypt from traditional foreign associates and sources of aid’.Footnote 152 Some downplayed the importance of the struggle over Palestine to Egypt's foreign relations and advocated reaching a settlement able to normalize relations with Israel, a policy tending back to Cairo's international relations of the years before the intervention in the 1948 war, and hinting forward to the resurgent ‘Egypt-first’ nationalism of President Anwar Sadat after 1974.Footnote 153 The characters of the opposition may have recalled the politics of the past but the content of their vision presaged many of the struggles of the future.
In this context, and with such stakes, the temporary stain of collaboration in 1956 seemed a small price to pay. For many nationalist intellectuals, it was the continuance of the military regime and Nasser's personal rule in Egypt which was unthinkable, and Mahmoud Abul Fath's propaganda writings often convey a sense of disbelief at what he perceived to be the new ideology constructed in support of the regime. For him the doctrine, ‘which Nasser himself proclaims’, that ‘the Egyptian people…are not yet fit for a parliamentary system’ was at the core of the offence caused to their nationalist pride.Footnote 154 This was compounded by the impression that the United States, and at times Britain, endorsed the regime's view that the Egyptians were in need of ‘the tutelage of ten inexperienced [and] ignorant young colonels’. And all this, moreover, was at a time when, as Abul Fath noted, Britain was progressively conceding parliamentary self-government to its colonies in West Africa.Footnote 155 Nationalism was grounded, after all, in an assertion of the greatness of the historical nation, while the emphasis of Nasser's ideology on Egypt's putative two thousand years of submission to foreign rule and humiliation contained an explicit rejection of the country's past, combined with an explicit emphasis of the incapacity of the Egyptian people to ‘carry the responsibility’ of political freedom.Footnote 156 This was a revolutionary or what Michael Walzer has characterized as a ‘national liberationist’ ideology before a nationalist one.Footnote 157 Egypt's other nationalists therefore sought, domestically through 1952–4 and from exile in 1954–6, to enunciate a liberal, monarchist, or religious nationalist vision, which was constructed in direct opposition to the radical new philosophy of government espoused and practised by the military regime. Up to the summer of 1956, as P. J. Vatikiotis observed some decades ago, alternative courses for popular nationalism in Egypt remained open. But the Suez episode temporarily closed off these alternate avenues, to ‘preclude all of them except the one of Nasser's personal hegemony’.Footnote 158 Nationalism was contested in the Suez crisis, as many contemporaries appreciated, and was ultimately transformed by it. The Suez crisis ‘through Egyptian eyes’ must also be a story of domestic political consolidation by a military regime, as well as one of a bold and ultimately victorious act of foreign policy against a former imperial power, and the trade off was apparently less straightforward than it has since been perceived.
For those who took the step, the sacrifices were real enough. Mustafa al Nahhas lived another nine years in house arrest and isolation until his death in 1965, though he reportedly never lost hope that the Wafd would one day return.Footnote 159 His one-time collaborator, Hassan al Hudaybi, passed almost eighteen years of detention, remaining titular head of the Muslim Brotherhood until his death in 1973, by which time the movement had suffered successive regime assaults and undergone steady radicalization.Footnote 160 Mohamed Naguib was the only of the three to live long enough to be released in the infitah and subsequent de-Nasserization under President Sadat, and write two books of memoirs. But in his nineteen years of imprisonment, Naguib had suffered some of the cruellest blows, including the deaths of two of his sons at the hands of the regime's security forces.Footnote 161 In common with a range of politicians and men of action cast down by the regime, Naguib found solace in the mundane, taking pride in breeding cats in the treeless yard behind his prison; just as, on the other side of Cairo, his alleged co-conspirator Dr Mohamed Salah al Din, who as foreign minister had once kept the UN General Assembly in thrall with his radically anti-British rhetoric, whiled away his sentence in the infamous Torah prison working as a tailor.Footnote 162
In exile, the community fissured in the aftermath of the crisis. Mahmoud Abul Fath was finally overtaken by his poor health and restless work-schedule and died at a spa in southern Germany in 1958. After Cairo refused the return of his body to Egypt, this Egyptian newsman and politician, Lebanese political refugee, and citizen of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, was buried at a state funeral in Tunis at the invitation of President Habib Bourguiba, who eulogized Abul Fath as a ‘great Arab nationalist’.Footnote 163 His brothers Ahmed and Hussein continued the struggle in Europe, supported briefly by the French government to set up an anti-Nasser radio station to broadcast in the Middle East.Footnote 164 But both would soon retire from political action and reconcile with the Sadat regime. Ahmed returned to Egypt in 1974 after twenty years in exile, and spent his remaining thirty years fighting the historiographical battle over the Nasser years.Footnote 165 Meanwhile, Ahmed Mortada al Maraghi stumbled from the Suez crisis directly into a fresh conspiracy to unseat Nasser, a final, and this time farcical, attempt to establish a restoration regime, which was dramatically betrayed by a double agent.Footnote 166 Anticipating a lifelong exile, he settled down to a comfortable life divided between Beirut and Rome, playing tennis and writing a book of memoirs about his time serving King Farouk, and was eventually also pardoned by Sadat in 1974.Footnote 167 Some could never make peace. Prince Amr Ibrahim, an old-style patriot who had once headed south in the summers to tend his agricultural estates at Nag Hamadi in Upper Egypt while the old regime's political classes departed en masse to Europe, spent the rest of his days in Switzerland, ever ready for action but increasingly sceptical of its chances. All these other Egyptian nationalists' fates were just a small part of the vaster debris of the Suez crisis, but they are a reminder nonetheless that the frequently evoked ‘rising tide’ of Arab nationalism did not only sweep away the foreigners in its path.
