By that he meant that he was content to play the role that the British had assigned to him as the first King of modern Egypt namely, to preside over the royal palace and nothing more.

Before he ascended the throne, Fuw'ad had been an impoverished playboy who owed money to everyone. Once he became , however, he devoted himself to saving as much money as he could. He never spent a piaster if he could possibly avoid it. He gave nothing to charity, except on formal occasions, and to my knowledge he once ordered the flogging of a Royal Guard who had picked some dates from one of the palm trees in the garden of Bustan Palace. In 1925, to save money, Fuw'ad even abolished the free rations that had long been one of the perquisites of the officers of the Royal Guards.
 
 
 

Queen Nazliy((see al-Hawashiy attached below), on the other hand, was a kindly person in spite of her many foibles. Once, I remember, my mother and two of my sisters went to call on the Queen by mistake. The wives and womenfolk of the Royal Guards had been invited to a tea party  on the occasion of the opening of Parliament. My mother and sisters, instead of going to the Royal Guards' barracks, where they should have gone, went to `Abdiyn Palace itself, where they were admitted to the Haramlik, the quarters reserved for the Queen and her ladies in waiting. They were received by Rida Agha, a tremendous Ethiopian, who was Fuw'ad's chief eunuch (an office that Faruwq happily abolished). Rida Agha ushered them into the presence of the Queen, who did her best to put them at their ease. They left as soon as they could, but not before Nazliy had presented them with gifts and announced that she would repay their visit.

That night my mother tearfully expressed the fear that I would be dismissed from the Royal Guards in consequence of her faux pas. For my part, I was afraid only of embarrassing the Queen if she called at our modest house, which was in one of the less fashionable sections of Cairo. My mother had used one of my visiting cards to identify herself, and I assumed that the Queen had received her in the mistaken impression that she was related to a certain Muhammad Nagiyb who happened to be a Pasha. A few days later a police officer attached to the palace called at our house to announce the impending arrival of some of the Queen's ladies in waiting. I explained to the officer that it was all a mistake and begged him to tender our apologies to the Queen. He must have done so, for her ladies in waiting never appeared.

Allenby not only demanded an apology and the payment of a fine amounting to £500,000 (then about $2,430,000); he also demanded the prohibition of political demonstrations; the retention of the British financial, judicial, and other advisers whom the Egyptian Government had decided to dismiss; and the withdrawal from Sudan, which would henceforth have its own private Defense Force, of all Egyptian troops. As a final punishment, Allenby abolished the restrictions on irrigation that had hitherto been applied to the Giziyrah area above Khartuwm. Henceforth, instead of being allowed to draw only enough water from the White Nile to irrigate 300,000 acres, the British controlled Giziyrah project would be free to draw all the water it could use, regardless of the needs of farmers in Lower Egypt.

Like most Egyptians, I sincerely regretted Stack's assassination, and I was thoroughly in favor of punishing everyone who was in any way responsible for the crime. At the same time I resented Allenby's ultimatum, for I felt that he had used the incident as a pretext for exacting concessions that he had no right to demand. I was so indignant, in fact, when I learned that my friends had been arrested, that I went to call on them at the Bab al-Khalq Prison. I was sure they were innocent, but, though they were later acquitted, the mere fact that I had visited them in my Royal Guards uniform aroused so much suspicion that I was confined to my quarters when I returned to `Abdiyn Palace.

`Aliy, who was also a member of the Royal Guards at the time, telephoned to ask me what had happened. I was afraid to tell him  over the telephone, but I later sent a mutual friend to ask him to hide my personal papers. I was afraid of being arrested myself, but my only punishment in the end was to be dismissed from the Royal Guards.

 As the Qur’an says, "It may be that you dislike a thing while it is good for you, and it may be that you love a thing while it is evil for you; and Allah knows while you know not." Although I was bitter at being ousted from the Royal Guards, my dismissal turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I was soon attached to the 8th Infantry Battalion, which was then garrisoned in al-Ma`adiy I was given so little to do that I was able to resume my studies and obtain my law degree in 1927. In that year I was married for the first time. Two years later I obtained my master's degree in political economy, and in 1931, the year in which my daughter Samiyhah was born, I obtained my master's degree in private law. I was on the point of resigning from the Army when I was unexpectedly promoted to the rank of Yuzbashiy (captain). My promotion so elated me that I decided to remain in the Army instead of trying to start a private law practice at the age of thirty. I later changed my mind again and began to study for my doctorate with the thought of becoming a professor of political economy. But from then on I had so little time to spare that I was unable to produce an acceptable thesis. The best of the five theses I prepared, "The Human aspects of the Army and Its Welfare," eventually served as the basis of a course of lectures that I delivered at the Senior Officers' School.

(To be continued)
 
 
 
 
 

At the death of Sultan Husayn Kamil the succession to the throne of Egypt posed a serious problem. The Sultan Husayn’s son, Prince Kamal al-Diyn,  a shy recluse individual,  had voluntarily renounced his claims to the succession. The next possibility was the Sultan's younger brother, the 49-year-old Prince Ahmad Fuw’ad(1). He was far from satisfactory because although he was no Anglophobe like his nephew `Abbas Hilmiy, he had been brought up in Italy where he had gone into exile with his father ‘Isma`iyl, spoke little Arabic and made no attempt to hide his lack of sympathy for Egypt or its problems (2). Unlike Husayn Kamil (or `Abbas Hilmiy for that matter) he was incapable of representing any section of Egyptian opinion to England and this proved disastrous in the aftermath of the war. But there was no obvious alternative and he was duly installed as SultanFuw’ad I after Husayn Kamil's death in October 1917. King Fuw’ad, the youngest son of the Khedive ‘Isma`iyl, had the temperament but not the aptitude of a royal autocrat. He was ambitious but lacked the nerve to impose his authority openly, and he was handicapped by his ignorance of the nation's character. His talent was for backstairs intrigue and manoeuvre. It cannot be said that he was deeply concerned with the welfare of his people.

Inevitably the revival of Egyptian autonomy meant the recovery of some of the power of the house of Muhammad `Aliy. In March 1922 SultanFuw’ad assumed the title of King Fuw’adI of Egypt. Because of Britain's privileged position in Egypt, Allenby retained the title of high commissioner (al-Manduwb al-Samiy) instead of becoming a regular ambassador (safiyr).

The extent of the restoration depended upon the constitution that was to be adopted and this was Egypt's first concern after the declaration of independence. A constitutional commission of prominent politicians, jurists, religious leaders and government officials was set up under the chairmanship of Rushdiy Pasha, the wartime premier. After six months the commission produced a draft constitution based on the Belgian model and a draft electoral law providing for universal suffrage. The draft constitution declared Egypt to be a sovereign independent state with Islam its religion and Arabic its official language. The legislature would consist of a Senate partly appointed by the King and partly elected and a wholly elected Chamber of Deputies.

The 1923 Constitution, as it became known, was finally promulgated on 19 April. The controversies over the constitution had forged an unnatural and temporary alliance between the king and the Wafd party, who for fundamentally different reasons were opposed to the Liberal Constitutionalists who were Co-operating with Allenby. The king succeeded in getting rid of Prime Minister `Abd al-KhaliqTharwat pasha in November 1922 but he could only replace him with political nonentities. Accordingly he turned to the Wafd for support although it must have been with some apprehension about the consequences. KingFuw’ad temporarily accepted the dominance of the Wafd and bided his time. For the remaining twenty-eight years of the Egyptian monarchy the same pattern was constantly repeated. Whenever there was a free election under the 1923 Constitution the Wafd invariably won a sweeping victory. King Fuw’ad would then seek way's of ousting the Wafd from power and ruling without them. He would succeed for some time and the Wafd was usually restrained from pursuing a full-blooded anti-monarchist policy by the fear of a repetition of the British intervention of 1882, but the Wafd would always return in time because the king would fall out with the non-Wafdist politicians or because the British Government, for its own reasons after the death of Sa`d Zaghluwl, always  favored the Wafd in power with Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas at its helm.
 
 

During the 1930s, ‘Isma`iyl Sidqqiy emerged as the "strong man" of Egyptian politics and an ardent opponent of the Wafd. It was he who abolished the constitution in 1930 and drafted another that enhanced the power of King Fuw’ad.
On 28 April 1936, King Fuw’ad died. Political intriguer to the last, his final gesture of restoring parliamentary government had not sufficed to make him popular. Since 1922 he had been a substantial force in Egyptian political life but never as much of one as he wished.

(1) In 1921 a Shaykh of al-Azhar remarked of the last three rulers of Egypt: `Abbas Hilmiy was a Turkish Pasha, Husayn Kamil an Egyptian farmer, and 'Ahmad Fuw’ad was an Italian Count !'

(2 )When Fuw’ad first came to Egypt having been brought up abroad with his exiled father the Khedive ‘Isma`iyl, he spoke little if any Arabic; when he did learn Arabic he, spoke it with a foreign accent and used foreign expression translated into Arabic, which consequently sounded strange. Sultan Fuw’ad's ludicrous blunders in Arabic were common currency in Cairo gossip. His voice was also an unfortunate dog-like bark as a result of a shooting incident with his jealous brother-in-law who was in love with his own sister, Fuw’ad's first wife.

(3)  "If you want this Bolshevik constitution then I claim all the powers and privileges of a Lenin,' the king remarked to a leading member of the commission. To the reply that it was not a Bolshevik but a democratic constitution he retorted: 'Then I claim all the powers and privileges of the president of the United States.' Ultimately his position was comparable to that of a US President with the important difference that he did not have to stand for election every four years. But he never forgave Allenby for imposing constitutional government on him".  Peter Mansfield, The British in Egypt   p.246 . Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971
 

Queen Nazliy was the daughter of `Abd al-Rahiym Pasha Sabriy, Minister of Agriculture, she was betrothed at the age of 22 to Fuw'ad who was a member of the khedive family, and had just divorced his first wife.  Shaykh al-'Azhar Muhammad  'Abuw al-Fadl al-Giyzawiyy politely declined to conduct the wedding ceremony, instead Shaykh Muhammad Nagiy president of the High Religious Court (al-Mahkamah al-Shar`iyyah) officiated at the marriage.   At the same time, her husband Fuw'ad received the title of Sultan by an order of a Firman from the Sublime Porte (Al-Bab al-`Aliy).  This title was accompanied by a gift valued at £ 300 and a golden watch, which the new Sultan unceremoniously passed on to his new wife as her (Mahr) dowry!!!

Her wedding was shunned by her husband 's royal family, and was not celebrated by the traditional singers nor musical performance.  Instead, the backdrop of the short ceremony was the sound of guns and the roaring shouts of a country up in arms against the British occupants in the unprecedented 1919 Revolution.

In February of 1920, she gave birth to a son (Faruwq I) whom the British High Commissioner General Allenby, in recognition of her husband 's loyal services to the British Crown, unilaterally acknowledged as the rightful heir to Egypt's throne.

Eventually Nazliy  became officially; the first Egyptian Queen in modern times.  Though her life as a Queen was utterly a continuous misery.  She was sheltered in an isolated royal Palace with no contact with the outside world.  Her life was monitored constantly by the compulsive jealously of her husband and consequently she was chaperoned for the next seventeen years by Madame Qatawiyy, the Royal Chambermaid.  Queen Nazliy gave birth to four children;  among them Faaruwq, the next king of Egypt  and  three Royal princesses: Fawziyah, Fayzah, and Firiyal. During the reign of her son king Faruwq I, the Queen mother had a fallout with him and eventually went on a self imposed exile to the United States of America where she lived until she died.