Khan 363hali’s 25-year-old shooter, Ibrahim Nassif al-Wardani, was the G
son of a minor notable who had been sent for study abroad in 1908 after
the death of his father. The young man had become committed to the
Egyptian nationalist movement while studying in London, Paris, and
Lausanne. During his stay there, Wardani had become close to Watani
Party President Muhammad Farid.^9 Wardani had remained active in
the Watani Party upon returning to Egypt in 1909 and shot the Prime
Minister a year later. At his trial, Wardani declared that what he had done
was his patriotic duty and went to the gallows insisting that he had killed
a traitor who served the British and not the Egyptians. British authorities
in Cairo and in London followed the trial and execution closely, and many
noted that several of Egypt’s most extreme young nationalists were actu-
ally graduates of European universities. This is what prompted the request
for a head count by Secretary of State Edward Grey in 1911.
e government authorities thus were alarmed to discover that Th
Wardani belonged to a cell within the Watani party, the Society of
Fraternal Solidarity [al-Tadamun al-Akhawi], which communicated in
ciphers and seemed to be researching means of gaining arms or bombs.
The authorities noted that most of the members of the Society were stu-
dents, although there were a few recent graduates in government employ-
ment.^10 Much to their chagrin, the police were unable to prosecute these
men as there was no law in Egypt outlawing such secret clubs. They did,
however, manage to get most of the students expelled from their schools,
a tactic that backfired in a few notable cases because it sent the young men
abroad to complete their education at a remove from British oversight.^11
Between France, Switzerland, and the United States, there was no shortage
of universities willing to take tuition-paying students and little desire to
police activity that was not directed against the host country. In Germany
and the Ottoman Empire, in fact, such students were recruited and often
even monetarily supported in the years leading up to the Great War.
e Egyptian newspapers made much of Wardani’s nationalist activ-Th
ity and foreign education, implying that these two elements might explain
how the son of a respectable family could become a murderer. In fact, the
usually anti-British paper al-Mu’ayyid claimed Wardani’s willingness to
commit political violence was a direct result of his Western education.^12
Similarly, the Occupation-sympathetic newspaper al-Muqattam had
noted the previous year that far too many students sent to study abroad