Britain's Role in Egypt • 255The 1919 Revolution
No Englishman foresaw a revival of Egyptian nationalism after the war.
The National Party had declined. The moderates, mostly landowners and
intellectuals, were few—though powerful—in the 1914 Legislative Assem¬
bly. One was Sa'd Zaghlul, the elected vice president of that representative
body, who then emerged as a prominent critic of the government and its
British advisers. Sa'd had an interesting background. Son of a prosperous
farmer, he was educated in the 1870s at al-Azhar University, where he came
under the influence of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. He then edited the govern¬
ment journal and backed the 1882 Urabi revolution. Shortly after the
British occupied Egypt, he was arrested for plotting to kill Khedive Tawfiq.
Upon getting out of jail, Sa'd studied law in France, returned to Egypt, be¬
came a judge, and married the prime minister's daughter. His wife's family
introduced him to Lord Cromer, who proposed him as education minister
during the nationalist reaction to the 1906 Dinshaway incident (described
in Chapter 12). In a public speech just before he left Egypt in 1907, Cromer
described Sa'd in the following terms: "He possesses all the qualities neces¬
sary to serve his country. He is honest, he is capable, he has the courage of
his convictions, he has been abused by many of the less worthy of his own
countrymen. These are high qualifications. He should go far."
Sa'd did go far, but not in the way Cromer had hoped. His progress
through the Egyptian cabinet was thwarted by his quarrels with both
Khedive Abbas and Lord Kitchener, so he quit the cabinet in 1912. Many
British officials would later wish they had continued to co-opt Sa'd to their
side, instead of letting him join their opponents. During the war, with the
legislature not meeting, Sa'd had ample time to plot against the govern¬
ment. He was a poker player, and one of his buddies was Husayn Kamil's
successor, Sultan Fuad (r. 1917-1936), who hoped to increase his power,
relative to that of the British in Egypt, once the war ended, and thus he en¬
couraged Sa'd.
Fuad's ambitions were matched by those of many Egyptian politicians,
who wanted parliamentary government, liberal democracy, and Egyptian
control over the Sudan, untrammeled by the British protectorate. Well ed¬
ucated, high-minded, and devoid of religious fanaticism, they looked to
Sa'd Zaghlul as their spokesman, as he had been in the 1914 assembly.
On 13 November 1918, two days after the European armistice, Sa'd and
two of his friends called on the British high commissioner, Sir Reginald
Wingate, a man who had lived in the Nile Valley for twenty years, spoke
Arabic, and knew them well. In a cordial conversation, they announced
their plan to form a delegation (Arabic: wafd) to go to London to argue for