Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil
age of sixteen), could scarcely rule freely with the British army stationed a few miles away from his capital, and his frustration was redirected toward the country’s shaky parliamentary system. To assert royal prerogative in the face of the Wafd majority party, he developed the habit of fabricating reasons (sometimes in agreement with the British) to dissolve parliament, dismiss elected cabinets and place royalists on the political saddle. He even went so far as to form a secret assassination squad, known as the Iron Guards, to dispose of his political enemies. Al-Wafd, in turn, felt morally justified to ally with anyone (including the British) to guarantee their democratic right to lead parliament and the executive. This cat-and-mouse game between the crown and the majority party not only poisoned domestic politics, it empowered the British even further. Exasperation with formal politics diverted popular energy toward a rising religious movement that claimed that national independence could only be achieved through moral reform and strict adherence to Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood, a movement established in the port city of Ismailia on the Suez Canal in 1928, was gaining new followers by the day. Its ranks had swelled by the late 1940s to an alleged 2 million supporters, which represented 10 percent of the population.
This was the Egypt under which the Free Officers (most of them in their thirties at the time of the coup) had come of age. But politics was not the only thing on the mind of those patriotic members of the Free Officers; social disparities and stagnation were equally alarming at the time. Although over half of Egypt’s 21 million inhabitants were employed in agriculture, 12,000 large and middling landowners (crowned by 147 elite families) controlled a third of arable land, while close to 11 million peasants remained landless. Observers at the time hoped that the budding capitalist class, emboldened by a sudden influx of wealth, would level the social field by breaking the economic monopoly of this archaic landed class. Egyptian merchants had amassed great fortunes by selling cotton, the country’s main export product, at prices inflated by the American Civil War in the 1860s, and again by making the best out of the demand created by the two world wars. However, merchants were slow in making the transition to industrialism. In the 1950s, manufacturing contributed a mere 8 percent to the national income, and most of Egypt’s 1.3 million workers were little more than glorified artisans.1 More importantly, the country’s nascent industrialists did not seem determined to transform the regime politically. In other developing countries, especially those laboring under the colonial yoke like Egypt, capitalists usually encouraged coups. Failing to dismantle (or share power with) the landed elite, fearful of radical popular forces, and eager to industrialize the country as rapidly as possible, capitalists elect to hand over political power to a strong executive capable of protecting and furthering their economic interests. That is to say: the bourgeoisie surrendered the sword to the military dictatorship to save the purse.
Egypt had all the ingredients that favored such a scenario during the period preceding the coup. The mostly absentee landed class remained set in its ways, refusing calls for land reform and resisting commercialization and capitalization of agriculture, preferring to squander its wealth on the conspicuous consumption of imported luxuries. More dangerously, it undercut local demand in the countryside by reducing wages and increasing rents. To top it off, capitalists felt politically helpless next to this landed class, occupying only a humble 14 percent of seats in the last parliament before the coup (elected in 1950), compared with the landowners’ 63 percent.2 At the same time, the British occupation and the perceived corruption of political life fueled radical and fascist tendencies among students, professionals, and workers. The demonstrations, strikes, and political assassinations of the postwar years were hardly conducive to business.
Meanwhile, the officer corps itself was becoming larger and middle class in composition. Although the British had for long made sure the army remained limited in size and staffed by meek aristocrats, the gathering storm of Nazism forced it to revise its position and prepare a somewhat reliable force for the dark days ahead—hence their infusion of the military with middle-class members (the sons of middling landowners, professionals, and merchants), those who could actually fight. As part of the preparation for a possible war, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty reallocated British officers to the strategic Suez Canal Zone and sanctioned an enlarged Egyptian military to defend the cities and provide logistical support. Over the following decade, the army expanded from 3,000 to 100,000 men, and while its size was reduced after it had served its purpose in the Second World War, it remained relatively large at 36,000 men. The founders of the Free Officers Movement belonged to the first batch of middle-class youth that joined the Military Academy in the late 1930s (eight of the eleven ringleaders came from landless families), and they naturally resented the privileges of the landed elite.3 It is also conceivable that, by virtue of their links with the British army, Egyptian officers learned to appreciate the importance of modern democratic statehood, and realized that their control over the means of violence put them in the best position to transform their own society accordingly.
Nonetheless, Egyptian capitalists remained wedded to the old aristocracy until the very end. Despite their eagerness to do away with this spendthrift and thoughtless class, they favored compromise over revolution. Egypt’s still limited industrialization meant that its proletariat was too small and dispersed to make a bid for power. Increasing radicalization in the cities was perhaps unsettling, but it was certainly far from threatening. Capitalists believed there was still time for reform. Also, massive peasant revolts were equally unlikely because the Egyptian state (comparable to Russia in 1905, and unlike France in 1789) had strong control mechanisms in place in the countryside. Like their Russian counterparts in 1917, Egyptian capitalists worried that spearheading a revolt against the landowning class might ultimately work against them: that the ensuing turmoil might sweep away all economic elites, landlords and industrialists alike.
While the bourgeoisie was still weighing its options, the 1952 coup seemed to present a reasonable way out: it promised to undermine large landowners, encourage industry, and keep social unrest in check. Capitalists, therefore, welcomed the coup at first, though they certainly played no role in initiating it, nor did they manage to control the forces it unleashed. Nor were the Free Officers committed liberals seeking to modernize Egypt in the interests of capitalism. If anything, the movement was notorious for its ideological eclecticism: a few of its members were Islamists; some were socialists, Communists, or fascists; many were pragmatists; and the majority did not think beyond removing the corrupt political elite and returning to the barracks.
So if the coup was neither designed to save a distressed capitalist class nor to modernize and democratize Egypt, what really motivated it? A brief survey of the decade leading to the coup reveals three factors that impinged directly on the military’s image and corporate interests: first, humiliation at home and abroad; second, the increased reliance on the military for domestic repression; and third, transferring control over military affairs from elected government to the monarch.
Most historians have noted the demoralizing effect of the so-called February 4, 1942, incident, when officers stationed around the royal palace stood powerless as British tanks surrounded them and forced King Farouk, almost at gunpoint, to replace the existing government (suspected of Nazi sympathies) with one led by the liberal al-Wafd. Although the king did not call on the army to interfere, the officers’ pride was irrevocably bruised as they watched their sovereign humiliated by the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson (Lord Killearn), while they stood by impotent. Four hundred officers, including the founder and leader of the Free Officers Movement, infantry lieutenant colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser, met three days later at the Officers Club and decided to organize resistance against British troops. They sent a delegation led by another Free Officer, artillery major Salah Salem, to inform the monarch of their decision, only to be warned by his chamberlain that such a provocation could only push Britain to further escalate.4 The whole incident left the officers bitter toward the whole political elite: the cowardly king who obeyed foreign dictates, the opportunist majority party that formed a government under foreign tutelage, and of course, the British bullies. In a letter to a school friend, a devastated Nasser bemoaned: “I am ashamed of our army’s powerlessness.”5 Major General Muhammad Naguib of the Border Guards, who Nasser later enlisted as a figurehead for the movement (believing that his seniority would lend credibility to the coup), tendered his resignation after the army failed to uphold the country’s honor, and described the incident in his memoirs as the turning point that convinced him