Britain's Role in Egypt • 259The Power Triangle
As the battle lines were drawn, three sides, not two, emerged. The following
decade of Anglo-Egyptian relations can be summed up as an emerging
power triangle. In one corner stood the British, anxious to protect their po¬
sition in Egypt with respect to India and the rest of the Middle East but less
and less eager to reform Egypt's internal affairs. On several occasions the
British government, especially in 1924 and 1929 when the Labour Party
was in power, tried to negotiate with Egypt for a treaty to replace the Four
Reserved Points. These attempts always foundered on the intransigence of
the second party to the struggle, the Wafd Party. This was the popular
Egyptian nationalist movement, led by Sa'd Zaghlul until his death in 1927,
then less ably by Mustafa al-Nahhas until the 1952 revolution. Its insistence
on Egypt's complete independence made the Wafd the most popular polit¬
ical party by far, among Copts as well as Muslims. It could win any free
election in which it chose to run candidates for Parliament.
It might have held power longer had it not antagonized the third party in
the power triangle, King Fuad, who wanted to augment his own power at
the expense of parliamentary government. He could count on the coopera¬
tion of rival parties and politicians to form governments more amenable
than the Wafd to his wishes. The king could also make appointments
within the Egyptian army, civil administration, and ulama. In 1930, when
the contest between the Wafd and the British grew too intense, Fuad and
his prime minister declared a state of emergency, replaced the 1923 consti¬
tution with a more authoritarian one, and turned Egypt's government into
a royal dictatorship for the following five years.
Even though Egyptian politics were chaotic during the 1920s and 1930s,
these years saw a remarkable renaissance of Arab culture in Egypt. The pro¬
liferation of political parties led to soaring numbers of newspapers, maga¬
zines, and publishing houses. Egyptian authors, often educated in France,
began to publish novels, short stories, poems in meters never before used
in Arabic, and essays about the country's problems. Taha Husayn, a remark¬
able writer trained at al-Azhar and the newly formed Egyptian National
University, published many essays, one of which argued that most pre-
Islamic Arabic poetry, long seen by Muslims as the formative influence on
the Arabic language and hence on the Quran, had not in fact been composed
until after the time of Muhammad. Another writer argued that Ataturk's
controversial abolition of the caliphate in 1924 would do Islam no harm, for
the religion did not require having a caliph. These essays caused widespread
controversy when they were published, as educated Egyptians had to decide
how much they wanted their country to break with hallowed Muslim tradi¬
tions. Some Egyptians glorified the pharaonic past at the expense of their