262 • 15 EGYPT'S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCEform a rival party. Meanwhile, the government was doing little to solve
Egypt's pressing economic and social problems. The extremes of wealth
and poverty were grotesque, all the more so in a country where nearly all
the people (about 16 million in 1937) lived on 3 percent of the land, in an
area roughly equal to the entire state of New Jersey. Egypt was becoming
much more urbanized and somewhat industrialized. Although foreigners
continued to dominate the ranks of the owner and managerial classes,
Egyptian industrial capitalists were gaining. In addition, there was a grow¬
ing middle class of Egyptian professionals, shopkeepers, clerks, and civil
servants. The Capitulations, long a drag on Egypt's independence, were
abolished in 1937, and even the Mixed Courts, special tribunals for civil
cases involving foreign nationals, were phased out over the next twelve
years. No longer would Egypt's large foreign (and minority) communities
get special privileges and protection.
Still, most Egyptian people remained as poor after independence as they
had been under the British, for the landowners and capitalists who domi¬
nated Parliament did not favor social reform. Poverty, illiteracy, and disease
stalked the lives of most Egyptian workers and peasants to a degree unparal¬
leled in Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East. The failure of nationalism
and liberal democracy to solve these problems led many Egyptians to turn to
other ideologies. A few intellectuals embraced Marxist communism, even
though the USSR seemed remote and—in that era of Stalin's purge trials and
destruction of the free peasants—unappealing as a model for Egypt to fol¬
low. Besides, the communists' militant atheism made their doctrine abhor¬
rent to the Muslim masses. Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany provided
alternative models more attractive to Egyptians disillusioned with liberal de¬
mocracy, and a right-wing authoritarian party, Young Egypt, did arise.
But the most popular Egyptian movement of the 1930s was one wholly
indigenous to the country, the Society of the Muslim Brothers (al-lkhwan
al-Muslimun). The Muslim Brothers wanted Egypt to restore the customs
and institutions of Islam established by Muhammad and his followers.
Though well known for attacking Christians and Jews, as well as their
demonstrations against movies, bars, modern female fashions, and other
"Western innovations," the Muslim Brothers had a valid point. They were
reacting against a century (or more) of westernizing reforms that had
brought little benefit and much harm to the average Egyptian. For most
Egyptians, the Brothers' slogan, "The Quran is our constitution," made
better sense than the demands for independence and democratic govern¬
ment set forth by the Wafd and the other parties. The parliamentary sys¬
tem, helpless to solve Egypt's social problems and incapable of meeting the
challenges of Young Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, stumbled from one