Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

The third and last of the healthy influences I have named is the development of the Arabic Press. Were we to consider merely the number of years the occupation has lasted, it might seem reasonable to suppose that it has been the most powerful of all the influences affecting the general character of the people, but, as I have pointed out in the last chapter, it was not until after the evacuation of Fachoda that it had any really solid or lasting effect. Prior to that event the Egyptians had undoubtedly learned to appreciate the principles illustrated in the administration of the country by the English, but the uncertainty that overhung the future prevented even the warmest admirers and advocates of English methods taking up a strong or definite position in their favour. During the earlier part of the occupation which as yet has been by far the longest, the greatest benefit conferred upon the Egyptians was therefore the freedom it gave them to profit from the influences with which I have already dealt. When the change came it found the great majority of the people ready and willing to accept the friendship and guidance of England, and the strength and honesty of this feeling was clearly visible in their attitude during the disastrous opening of the South African War which followed so soon after. While the Armenians openly and offensively rejoiced at every fresh telegram of disaster and defeat, the Egyptians not only preserved in public the calm they had shown during the Fachoda incident, but among themselves were not slow in expressing sympathy. The reactionary party and some of the lower classes were, perhaps not unnaturally, pleased to see English pride humbled, but the one and only class that really rejoiced at the humiliation was, as I have said, the Christian Armenians. Among Pan-Islamic circles there was a sincere wish for the triumph of the English, for these knew that the interests of the Moslems of South Africa were bound up with theirs, and that though the Moslems had many just grounds of complaint against the treatment accorded them by the colonists, and the lack of protection afforded them by the Home Government, they knew that the tyranny of the colonist was, after all, better than the friendship of the Boer. In this view the majority of the people shared, and though the reactionary Press thought it good policy to profess a desire for the collapse of British rule, and to laud the Boers as heroes fighting for liberty and so forth, they knew well enough that the Boers would have laughed to scorn any idea of granting social or political freedom or equality to any Egyptian, or Mahomedan, however high his rank.

Under the Mamaluks, as we have seen, contrary to the commonly held idea that the people dare not even protest against the injustices by which they were oppressed, it was no unusual thing for them to do so, and if they did not profit more from the power of resistance they possessed, it was because they were too indifferent to, or too ignorant of, their own interests to defend these as they might have done. Under Mahomed Ali and his successors they were not only tongue-tied, but enslaved in a far worse manner than they had ever been by the Mamaluks. Under the English they have enjoyed the most perfect liberty of speech – a liberty that is only slowly subjecting itself to the self-restraint that alone can render it as serviceable to their true interests as it ought to be. It was but natural therefore that the Press, for a large part written and conducted by men of no position or influence, and actuated by no higher desire than to gain the momentary applause of their readers, should put the Eatanswill Gazette to shame in its own particular line, and that the folly and ineptitude of its articles should make the Egyptians ridiculous in the eyes of all intelligent people. But these are the faults of youth and inexperience and lack of education, and are largely due to the bad example of European papers of little if any higher merit. Slowly but steadily the Egyptian Press has moved, and is still moving, towards a worthier standard, and the fact that its movement is a spontaneous and voluntary one is an incontestable proof that the Egyptians are a people not only capable of, but anxious for, self-improvement, and a people entirely deserving of liberty. It is a maxim in mechanics that the weakest link in a chain is a measure of the strength of the whole. Of the newspaper Press of a country I think it may be said that its strength and merit are to be judged by its best. So judged we cannot but think well of the Egyptian Press. That the liberty accorded to it is still abused by journals on a par with the lowest type of journalism in Europe is to be regretted. It is an evil that will eventually cure itself. Meanwhile the liberty granted to the Press has undoubtedly been the chief boon conferred by England upon the country. It is a gift that has done more to educate and elevate the people and promote healthy progress than all else, or aught else, that has been done for the attainment of these ends. Slowly but surely it is doing the great work accomplished in England mainly through the establishment of Sunday and "Ragged" Schools – the raising of the intellectual standard of the people, the formation and nurturing of healthy ambitions, and the creation of a higher and purer conception of all the relations of life. All that England has done for the financial, commercial, and general material welfare of the country and of its inhabitants, almost immeasurably great and good as this work has been, is but a trifle to the results that may ultimately spring directly from the liberty given to the Press. As I have said, the progress being made is slow, so slow that European critics fail to grasp its real extent and value, but it is steady, widespread and real, a progress that will not be easily checked, and one that is doing more to change the character of the Egyptians in a healthy, life-giving manner than any other influence tending in the same direction.

The good work that is thus being done is due in the first place to the sound and enlightened views of Lord Cromer, who has persistently refused to be guided, or rather misguided, by the suggestions of those who would fain see a censorship established. By the course he has adopted Lord Cromer has thrown upon the journalists of the country a degree of responsibility of which, though as yet its obligations are not fully recognised by those on whom they lie, must tend, and is indeed tending, to render the Press worthy of the trust reposed in it. It is due to the sense of this responsibility already felt both by journalists and the public, that the serious journalists find themselves compelled more and more to justify the policy they advocate, and to maintain it with consistency. Thus instructed by experience, the people are yearly exacting a higher standard of excellence from the Press, and the demand is being met by a corresponding improvement. We must not forget, however, that the possibilities inherent in Lord Cromer's wise policy might have still been lying dormant and unproductive, if among the Egyptians there had been no one to see these, and, taking them up, render them in some degree an actuality. Fortunately the occasion brought the man. It was in the year 1887 that a small weekly Arabic paper styled the Adab was first established at Cairo. This rapidly becoming known for the ability with which its articles were written, continued to grow in favour with the Mahomedan public, to which it was specially addressed, as a journal devoted to science, literature, and religion, until the year 1890 when its editor joined the staff of the daily newspaper, the Moayyad, of which, three years later, he became the sole proprietor. From that date onward the Moayyad progressed rapidly, and becoming the recognised organ of the Ulema of the Azhar, took the position it still maintains as the leading Arabic and Islamic journal, not only in Egypt but throughout the Mahomedan world. Various journals have been started from time to time in opposition to or rivalry with the Moayyad, but none have ever succeeded in impairing its supremacy. From first to last this success has been attained and preserved by the Sheikh Ali Youssef, its proprietor and editor. Well read in all learning that qualifies a man to take his place among the Ulema, but ignorant of every language save his own, the Sheikh, as a newspaper man and a leader writer, is not only foremost among the journalists of the East, but one who in his chief merit has few, if any, rivals among the journalists of the world. "His paper," says Mr. Hartmann in his "Arabic Press of Egypt," "is a power to be reckoned with. Moslems read it with pleasure, finding in it what most delights their hearts. There they read in strong, well-chosen and simple language their own thoughts, or rather, what they imagine to be their own thoughts; for such is the art of the cunning journalist, that the unsuspicious reader follows in the track of the writer's thoughts and fancies them to be his own." When I add that this man is a man of thought, of great self-restraint, endowed with patience, energy, and perseverance, I have drawn the picture of one who, in any community, must exercise a large influence as a journalist, but amidst a people like the Egyptians, so little prone to think for themselves, must indeed be a power to reckon with. As a fact, he has done more to guide and mould Moslem opinion in Egypt than any other ten men that could be named. Like the historian Gabarty, of Arabic origin he is personally a reserved, thoughtful man, leading a quiet, studious life, adverse to ostentation and parade of every kind, and yet possessing keen business instincts. The position he has won for his journal has been gained by the steady pursuit of the policy which he from the first adopted – the love of justice and the desire to promote the interests of Islam and of Egypt. He has again and again had to meet the open hostility of different classes of the people he has been trying to serve, for he has not hesitated to advocate unpopular measures and ideals when these have commended themselves to his judgment, and yet he is persistently set down by Europeans as a fanatic and intriguer! Recognising as fully as any man can do the advantages that the English occupation has conferred upon the country, he is yet as a Moslem compelled to weigh these against the disadvantages due, not specially to the presence of the English but to the influence of the European Powers generally. Striving always to hold a just balance, never hasty to judge, fearless though moderate in the expression of his views, he is the one and only journalist in the country who for years past has steadily and with absolute honesty of purpose endeavoured to promote harmony and goodwill between the people and their English rulers. The Egyptians have long since recognised this. There was a time, indeed, when not a few of them cried out that he had been bought by the English. Unfortunately Europeans understand neither the man nor his policy, and seizing upon some extract from his paper, as often as not wrested from a qualifying context, and possibly written by an outside contributor, paint him as a firebrand and fanatic.

The best gift that England has yet given Egypt is, then, the freedom of the Press, for this has been and is the influence tending more and more strongly than any other towards the healthy development of the character of the people. There are some, if not many, who, claiming to know the country, will be inclined to deny this, but should no malign counter influence arise to stay the progress now being made, I am confident the verdict of the future will justify my view.

The three healthy influences I have thus described – the the increased knowledge of European civilisation, and of the present condition of the Islamic world, and the development of the Arabic Press – are each stimulating and correcting the other, and are those which of all others are working to modify and improve the national character. The result they have so far jointly produced has been that the Egyptian is learning to take a broader and therefore a healthier view of himself and his surroundings, and has acquired new and nobler aspirations. His ideals are no longer what they were but a quarter of a century ago, and, in recognising this fact, he recognises that the change has been brought about very largely through the English occupation, and that it is a change for the better. Nor is the Egyptian ungrateful, as he is often and unjustly accused of being. If his gratitude is not more pronounced, unfortunately there is too ample reason for its moderation.

Long years ago my old nurse once showed me a pot of my favourite jam and promised that my watering lips should feast upon it without restraint provided I were a good boy and first took a spoonful of Gregory's Powder. I can still remember how my lips dried up at the very mention of that most abominable of all the medicines ever thrust upon suffering humanity, and I turned with loathing from the jam that a moment before had been so lusciously appetising.

Let us see what is the Gregory's Powder that taints the sweetness of the benefits that England has conferred upon Egypt.

CHAPTER XIX

UNHEALTHY INFLUENCES

I should have been well contented if it had been possible for me to write this chapter as a parody of that ever famous one on "The Snakes of Ireland." Unhappily there are unhealthy influences in Egypt – influences placing difficulties in the way of the English administrators of the country, ever discouraging and disheartening the Egyptian, ever tending to turn him from the path of progress, influences that have been and are holding back the advance that is being made.

In my last chapter I spoke of the benefits derived from the liberty of the Press; in this I have to speak of the evil it produces, for first and chief of all the unhealthy influences in Egypt is the Mokattam, the newspaper that is regarded as the special organ of English interests in Egypt. While yet Sheikh Ali was wholly unknown, three Syrian Christians who had established a monthly literary magazine at Beirout, decided to transfer it to Cairo. There it acquired a well-deserved popularity it still maintains. Possessed of ability, and full of the energy and enterprise that is a characteristic of their race, the proprietors of this monthly saw in the English occupation an opportunity of enlarging their sphere of action and started a daily paper, the Mokattam, just a year before the Moayyad appeared. The policy that this new journal adopted, and has persistently maintained to the present day, was the twofold one of supporting English interests in Egypt and of attacking Islam and the Turkish Empire on all possible occasions. Caring nothing for their adopted country, and ever mindful of the fact that it was the interference of the European Powers that compelled Mahomed Ali to abandon Syria, they entered upon their task with enthusiasm, and, though the Moayyad was not long in passing it in popularity, they early succeeded in gaining for the Mokattam the position it holds of undoubtedly the ablest of all the Christian journals published in the Arabic language. Save only as to the lines upon which it seeks to promote the policy it advocates, it may indeed justly claim the highest praise for the manner in which it is written and conducted.

In the days when the English occupation and the two rival journals, the Moayyad and the Mokattam, were all still young, Egyptian politics and therefore Egyptian newspapers were run upon purely party lines, and as Dr. Johnson thought he was best fulfilling his mission in seeing that "the Whig dogs did not get the best of it," so all who dabbled in any degree with Egyptian politics thought it their bounden duty to admit no good or merit in any who opposed their views. Hence, while the English administrators were still blunderingly trying to find their way through the maze of difficulties they had to encounter, and trying first this and then that remedy for the evils they had to contend with, from the newspapers and people of the country they could get no assistance whatever. It was the policy of the Mokattam to support the English, and with the editors' primitive ideas they could find no other way of doing this than by lauding with indiscriminate praise everything the English did or proposed to do. It was the policy of the Moayyad to decry and depreciate all that the Mokattam approved or supported. Each of the two papers was thus pursuing exactly the line most calculated to defeat its own aim, and throw discredit on its own cause, for as the praise of the Mokattam was constantly being discounted by the admitted failure of the measures it had lustily approved, so the discrimination of the Moayyad was belittled by the success of those it had condemned. From that day to this the Mokattam has learned nothing. It pursues the same line to-day that it did then. It has not been so with the Moayyad. Sheikh Ali Youssef was far too able a man to be long in seeing the folly inherent in politics of this puerile type, and he determined to adopt a higher line. It was no easy task he thus set himself. He was still a young man, and as such his abilities received rather stinted acknowledgment from the greybeards, who were the leaders of the Moslem and National party. His journal was not yet strong enough to choose its own position, and its existence and influence, as well as his own future, depended wholly upon the support he received from self-satisfied, self-willed men, who thought it their province to dictate and not to learn. And with this difficulty Sheikh Ali had the graver one of having to find a policy and a method of advocating it that would practically reconcile the almost irreconcilable. Like all Egyptians, and indeed all non-Christian Easterns, he held then, as now, that of all the European Powers England was the one with which friendship was most possible. It was, however, at the moment the approved policy of the Egyptian National party to profess a preference for France, and therefore the Moslem papers were expected to hold up France and the French as the friends and allies of Islam. Had Sheikh Ali attacked this view, his rashness would have been the death-knell of the Moayyad. He saw this clearly, but he was not a man to be deterred by difficulties, or daunted by dangers. That which was right and true was right and true, and it was his duty, as one of the Ulema, to teach and to preach that which was right and true. But to run amuck against the prevailing prejudices would be to ensure failure. If he were to succeed, it must be by degrees, by the slow and patient conversion of others to his views, by a steady and almost stealthy diffusion of his ideas. In the East the circulation and writings of a journal are often but little guide to the power and influence really possessed by its editor, for an editor is frequently able to accomplish far more by his direct personal influence, outside his journal, than he could by the most earnest or able advocacy of those views in its columns. It was so with Sheikh Ali. There were men of influence who were quite prepared to listen attentively to anything he had to say to them in private, and to accept and adopt his views in the same way, but who would not have tolerated a journal that rashly published the same ideas to the world at large. Starting boldly, yet with due caution, Sheikh Ali set himself to the task of educating his supporters. Slowly, and in sugar-coated pills of homeopathic size, he administered to them minute doses of the ideas he wished them to digest. Slowly, but surely and steadily, he overcame the difficulties before him. One by one, even those who would not consent to the Moayyad propagating such ideas, admitted that the Sheikh was right. Time went on, and with its flight the old fiery spirits of the Nationalist party, the "No surrender" men of the old type, gradually died out, and changes of many kinds came to pass, and still the Sheikh was struggling with opposition, and still he was steadily gaining ground; but as falling bodies gather speed and force in their descent, so intellectual movements gather force and speed in their ascent, and thus in spite of all difficulties, difficulties that only undauntable pluck, unwearied patience, and ability could face, much less triumph over, the Sheikh accomplished his purpose, and scarcely knowing how, or why, or indeed that it is so, the Egyptians have adopted the Sheikh's policy, a policy that may be summed up in the phrase, "Peace and Progress."

It would have been well for Egypt, and not less so for British interests, if the editors of the Mokattam had followed in the wake of Sheikh Ali, but, as I have said, their policy is to-day what it was at the beginning, the same narrow-minded bigotry in its pro-English partisanship and the same foolish fanaticism in its anti-Turkish crusade. The true interests of the country, or of their co-religionists, or of the occupation, are all alike sacrificed to their morbid love of wounding and hurting the religious and social sentiments of the Egyptians, or of venting their impotent hatred of the Turk. Thus their record is a record of evil, a record of needless difficulties heaped up in the way of the English administrators of the country, of ill-will and animosity excited among the people. The two strongest factors in the formation of Egyptian opinion are, as I have shown, the attachment of the people to their religion and their attachment to the Turkish Empire. Both these sentiments are persistently and wilfully outraged by the Mokattam. It does not indulge in the rabid rant of the anti-Turkish Press in England, but while keeping within the limits of decent language it loses no opportunity of saying aught that can wound the feelings, offend the prejudices, or excite the anger of the Moslems, and it does this as the organ of the English occupation, as a journal universally believed to be largely subsidised by the English, and therefore a journal believed also to be the expression of the real views, aims, and sentiments of the English occupants of the country. Is it any wonder that the pacific policy, the unbroken respect for Moslem prejudices that Lord Cromer has always shown, should assume in the eyes of the Egyptians the character of a temporary policy – a policy to be abandoned as soon as circumstances should permit the open adoption of the anti-Islamic policy of the avowed organ of English interests? The old reactionary party has almost wholly died out; what remains of it is not less in touch with the real sentiments of the people than is the Young Egypt party that to a certain extent is its successor, but neither of the two parties ever has done, or could do, a tithe of the harm the Mokattam is still doing. The attacks of the anti-Turkish Press in England, the anti-Islamic writings of the late Sir William Muir and other critics affect Moslems in Egypt or elsewhere but little, for it is known that these represent but narrow circles of thought, but that the local journal which is spoken of by Englishmen themselves as the "English organ" should be for ever out-Heroding the efforts of those circles has, and could have, but one result – a profound distrust of the professions made as to the true aim and object of the occupation. This is the key to the lack of enthusiasm, the want of gratitude, for which the Egyptians are so often rebuked. Men like Mr. Dicey may build up theories of their own on what, to the Englishman at home, may seem at least plausible arguments, but they are only drawing herrings across the trail of the true explanation. Thus the journal which, as Mr. Hartmann says, has "gained favour with Lord Cromer," has been of all other causes the one which has most freely and wantonly strewn his path with needless difficulties. Face to face with the anti-Islamic sentiments of the English organ in Egypt, it is utterly hopeless to expect Moslems in Egypt or elsewhere to regard the English occupation with any other feelings than those of distrust. Had the Mokattam been conducted upon conciliatory lines, had it striven to guide the English with the healthy, honest advice it could have given, had it endeavoured to promote an intelligent appreciation of the good work that has been done and is doing, it would have rendered a service of incalculable value to the English and to the Egyptians alike, and with their undoubted ability its editors would have taken their place among the greatest benefactors of the country. As it is they have wrought no service and much ill, and may pride themselves upon having been the greatest obstacle in the way of the progress that has been made. The one thing that Lord Cromer has needed most of all throughout his long, brilliant, and self-devoting struggle has been the cordial co-operation of the people. The one thing that more than all else has tended to deprive him of that co-operation has been the anti-Islamic attitude of the Arabic organ of the occupation. Had I been writing this a year ago it would have been possible for me to say that happily the growing confidence of the people in Lord Cromer and in the intentions of the English Government was steadily, if very slowly, undoing and counteracting the evil thus done. Unfortunately I cannot say so to-day. Events have occurred that have almost wholly scattered all the fruit of the progress that had been made in this direction.