Land of Egypt

Egypt’s land frontiers border Libya to the west, Sudan to the south, and Israel to the northeast. Egypt’s border with Sudan is notable for two areas, the Ḥalāʾib Triangle along the Red Sea and Biʾr Ṭawīl further inland, that are subject to differing claims by the two countries (see Researcher’s Note). In the north its Mediterranean coastline is about 620 miles (1,000 km), and in the east its coastline on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba is about 1,200 miles (1,900 km).

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The topography of Egypt is dominated by the Nile. For about 750 miles (1,200 km) of its northward course through the country, the river cuts its way through bare desert, its narrow valley a sharply delineated strip of green, abundantly fecund in contrast to the desolation that surrounds it. From Lake Nasser, the river’s entrance into southern Egypt, to Cairo in the north, the Nile is hemmed into its trenchlike valley by bordering cliffs, but at Cairo these disappear, and the river begins to fan out into its delta. The Nile and the delta form the first of four physiographic regions, the others being the Western Desert (Arabic Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Gharbiyyah), the Eastern Desert (Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Sharqiyyah), and the Sinai Peninsula.

The Nile divides the desert plateau through which it flows into two unequal sections—the Western Desert, between the river and the Libyan frontier, and the Eastern Desert, extending to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the Red Sea. Each of the two has a distinctive character, as does the third and smallest of the Egyptian deserts, the Sinai. The Western Desert (a branch of the Libyan Desert) is arid and without wadis (dry beds of seasonal rivers), while the Eastern Desert is extensively dissected by wadis and fringed by rugged mountains in the east. The desert of central Sinai is open country, broken by isolated hills and scored by wadis.

Egypt is not, as is often believed, an entirely flat country. In addition to the mountains along the Red Sea, mountainous areas occur in the extreme southwest of the Western Desert and in the southern Sinai Peninsula. The high ground in the southwest is associated with the ʿUwaynāt mountain mass, which lies just outside Egyptian territory.

The coastal regions of Egypt, with the exception of the delta, are everywhere hemmed in either by desert or by mountain; they are arid or of very limited fertility. The coastal plain in both the north and east tends to be narrow; it seldom exceeds a width of 30 miles (48 km). With the exception of the cities of Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez and a few small ports and resorts such as Marsā Maṭrūh and Al-ʿAlamayn (El-Alamein), the coastal regions are sparsely populated and underdeveloped.

 

 

The Nile valley and delta

The Nile delta, or Lower Egypt, covers an area of 9,650 square miles (25,000 sq km). It is about 100 miles (160 km) long from Cairo to the Mediterranean, with a coastline stretching some 150 miles (240 km) from Alexandria to Port Said. As many as seven branches of the river once flowed through the delta, but its waters are now concentrated in two, the Damietta Branch to the east and the Rosetta Branch to the west. Though totally flat apart from an occasional mound projecting through the alluvium, the delta is far from featureless; it is crisscrossed by a maze of canals and drainage channels. Much of the delta coast is taken up by the brackish lagoons of lakes Maryūṭ, Idkū, Burullus, and Manzilah. The conversion of the delta to perennial irrigation has made possible the raising of two or three crops a year, instead of one, over more than half of its total area.

The cultivated portion of the Nile valley between Cairo and Aswān varies from 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 km) in width, although there are places where it narrows to a few hundred yards and others where it broadens to 14 miles (23 km). Since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the 3,900-square mile (10,100 square km) valley has been under perennial irrigation.

Until it was flooded by the waters impounded behind the High Dam to form Lake Nasser, the Nubian valley of the Nile extended for 160 miles (250 km) between the town of Aswān and the Sudanese border—a narrow and picturesque gorge with a limited cultivable area. The 100,000 or so inhabitants were resettled, mainly in the government-built villages of New Nubia, at Kawm Umbū (Kom Ombo), north of Aswān. Lake Nasser was developed during the 1970s for its fishing and as a tourist area, and settlements have grown up around it.

Drainage

Apart from the Nile, the only natural perennial surface drainage consists of a few small streams in the mountains of the southern Sinai Peninsula. Most of the valleys of the Eastern Desert drain westward to the Nile. They are eroded by water but normally dry; only after heavy rainstorms in the Red Sea Hills do they carry torrents. The shorter valleys on the eastern flank of the Red Sea Hills drain toward the Red Sea; they, too, are normally dry. Drainage in the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula is toward the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba; as in the Red Sea Hills, torrent action has produced valleys that are deeply eroded and normally dry.

The central plateau of the Sinai drains northward toward Wadi al-ʿArīsh, a depression in the desert that occasionally carries surface water. One of the features of the Western Desert is its aridity, as shown by the absence of drainage lines. There is, however, an extensive water table beneath the Western Desert. Where the water table comes near the surface it has been tapped by wells in some oases.

Soils of Egypt

Outside the areas of Nile silt deposits, the nature of such cultivable soil as exists depends upon the availability of the water supply and the type of rock in the area. Almost one-third of the total land surface of Egypt consists of Nubian sandstone, which extends over the southern sections of both the Eastern and Western deserts. Limestone deposits of Eocene age (i.e., some 35 to 55 million years old) cover a further one-fifth of the land surface, including central Sinai and the central portions of both the Eastern and Western deserts. The northern part of the Western Desert consists of limestone dating from the Miocene Epoch (25 to 5 million years ago). About one-eighth of the total area, notably the mountains of the Sinai, the Red Sea, and the southwest part of the Western Desert, consists of ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks.

The silt, which constitutes the present-day cultivated land in the delta and the Nile valley, has been carried down from the Ethiopian Highlands by the Nile’s upper tributary system, consisting of the Blue Nile and the ʿAṭbarah rivers. The depth of the deposits ranges from more than 30 feet (10 metres) in the northern delta to about 22 feet (7 metres) at Aswān. The White Nile, which is joined by the Blue Nile at Khartoum, in Sudan, supplies important chemical constituents. The composition of the soil varies and is generally more sandy toward the edges of the cultivated area. A high clay content makes it difficult to work, and a concentration of sodium carbonate sometimes produces infertile black-alkali soils. In the north of the delta, salinization has produced the sterile soils of the so-called barārī (“barren”) regions.

Climate

Egypt lies within the North African desert belt; its general climatic characteristics, therefore, are low annual precipitation and a considerable seasonal and diurnal (daily) temperature range, with sunshine occurring throughout the year. In the desert, cyclones stir up sandstorms or dust storms, called khamsins (Arabic: “fifties,” as they are said to come 50 days per year), which occur most frequently from March to June; these are caused by tropical air from the south that moves northward as a result of the extension northeastward of the low-pressure system of Sudan. A khamsin is accompanied by a sharp increase in temperature of 14 to 20 °F (8 to 11 °C), a drop in relative humidity (often to 10 percent), and thick dust; winds can reach gale force.

The climate is basically biseasonal, with winter lasting from November to March and summer from May to September, with short transitional periods intervening. The winters are cool and mild, and the summers are hot. Mean January minimum and maximum temperatures show a variation between 48 and 65 °F (9 and 18 °C) in Alexandria and 48 and 74 °F (9 and 23 °C) at Aswān. The summer months are hot throughout the country’s inland, with mean midday high temperatures in June ranging from 91 °F (33 °C) at Cairo to 106 °F (41 °C) at Aswān. Egypt enjoys a very sunny climate, with some 12 hours of sunshine per day in the summer months and between 8 and 10 hours per day in winter. Extremes of temperature can occur, and prolonged winter cold spells or summer heat waves are not uncommon.

Humidity diminishes noticeably from north to south and on the desert fringes. Along the Mediterranean coast the humidity is high throughout the year, but it is highest in summer. When high humidity levels coincide with high temperatures, oppressive conditions result.

Precipitation in Egypt occurs largely in the winter months; it is meagre on average but highly variable. The amount diminishes sharply southward; the annual average at Alexandria is about 7 inches (175 mm), Cairo has about 1 inch (25 mm), and Aswān receives virtually nothing—only about 0.1 inch (2.5 mm). The Red Sea coastal plain and the Western Desert are almost without precipitation. The Sinai Peninsula receives somewhat more precipitation: the northern sector has an annual average of about 5 inches (125 mm).

People of Egypt

Ethnic groups

The population of the Nile valley and delta, which are home to the overwhelming majority of Egyptians, forms a fairly homogeneous group whose dominant physical characteristics are the result of the admixture of the indigenous African population with those of Arab ancestry. Within urban areas (the northern delta towns especially), foreign invaders and immigrants—Persians, Romans, Greeks, Crusaders, Turks, and Circassians—long ago left behind a more heterogeneous mixture of physical types. Blond and red hair, blue eyes, and lighter complexions are more common there than in the rural areas of the delta, where peasant agriculturists, the fellahin, have been less affected by intermarriage with outside groups.

The inhabitants of what is termed the middle Nile valley—roughly the area from Cairo to Aswān—are known as the Ṣaʿīdī, or Upper Egyptians. Though the Ṣaʿīdī as a group tend to be more culturally conservative, they are ethnically similar to Lower Egyptians. In the extreme southern valley, Nubians differ culturally and ethnically from other Egyptians. Their kinship structure goes beyond lineage; they are divided into clans and broader segments, whereas among other Egyptians of the valley and of Lower Egypt only known members of the lineage are recognized as kin. Although Nubians have mixed and intermarried with members of other ethnic groups—particularly with Arabs—the dominant physical characteristics tend to be those of sub-Saharan Africa.

The deserts of Egypt contain nomadic, seminomadic, and sedentary but formerly nomadic groups, with distinct ethnic characteristics. Apart from a few non-Arab tribal groups and the mixed urban population, the inhabitants of the Sinai and the northern section of the Eastern Desert are all fairly recent immigrants from Arabia, who bear some physical resemblances to Arabian Bedouin. Their social organization is tribal, each group conceiving of itself as being united by a bond of blood and as having descended from a common ancestor. Originally tent dwellers and nomadic herders, many have become seminomads or even totally sedentary, as in the northern Sinai Peninsula.

The southern section of the Eastern Desert is inhabited by the Beja, who bear a distinct resemblance to the surviving depictions of predynastic Egyptians. The Egyptian Beja are divided into two tribes—the ʿAbābdah and the Bishārīn. The ʿAbābdah occupy the Eastern Desert south of a line between Qinā and Al-Ghardaqah; there are also several groups settled along the Nile between Aswān and Qinā. The Bishārīn live mainly in Sudan, although some dwell in the ʿIlbah Mountain region, their traditional place of origin. Both the ʿAbābdah and Bishārīn people are nomadic pastoralists who tend herds of camels, goats, and sheep.

The inhabitants of the Western Desert, outside the oases, are of mixed Arab and Amazigh (Berber) descent. They are divided into two groups, the Saʿādī (not to be confused with the Ṣaʿīdī, Upper Egyptians) and the Mūrābiṭīn. The Saʿādī regard themselves as descended from Banū Hilāl and Banū Sulaym, the great Arab tribes that migrated to North Africa in the 11th century. The most important and numerous of the Saʿādī group are the Awlād ʿAlī. The Mūrābiṭīn clans occupy a client status in relation to the Saʿādī and may be descendants of the original Amazigh inhabitants of the region. Originally herders and tent dwellers, the Bedouin of the Western Desert have become either seminomadic or totally sedentary. They are not localized by clan, and members of a single group may be widely dispersed.

 

The original inhabitants of the oases of the Western Desert were Amazigh. Many peoples have since mixed with them, including Egyptians from the Nile valley, Arabs, Sudanese, Turks, and, particularly in the case of Al-Khārijah, sub-Saharan Africans—for this was the point of entry into Egypt of the Darb al-Arbaʿīn (Forty Days Road), the caravan route from the Darfur region of Sudan.

In addition to the indigenous groups, there are in Egypt a number of small foreign ethnic groups. In the 19th century there was rapid growth of communities of unassimilated foreigners, mainly European, living in Egypt; these acquired a dominating influence over finance, industry, and government. In the 1920s, which was a peak period, the number of foreigners in Egypt exceeded 200,000, the largest community being the Greeks, followed by the Italians, British, and French. Since Egypt’s independence the size of the foreign communities has been greatly reduced.

Languages of Egypt

The official language of Egypt is Arabic, and most Egyptians speak one of several vernacular dialects of that language. As is the case in other Arab countries, the spoken vernacular differs greatly from the literary language. Modern literary Arabic (often called Modern Standard Arabic or al-fuṣḥā, “clear” Arabic), which developed out of Classical, or medieval, Arabic, is learned only in school and is the lingua franca of educated persons throughout the Arab world. The grammar and syntax of the literary form of the language have remained substantially unchanged since the 7th century, but in other ways it has transformed in recent centuries. The modern forms of style, word sequence, and phraseology are simpler and more flexible than in Classical Arabic and are often directly derivative of English or French.

Alongside the written language, there exist various regional vernaculars and dialects of Arabic (these are termed collectively al-ʿammiyyah, “common” Arabic), which differ widely from the literary variant as well as from one another. Within the amorphous grouping referred to as Egyptian colloquial, a number of separate vernacular groups can be discerned, each fairly homogeneous but with further strata of variation within the group. (Variations from one locale to another are often subtle but at other times are quite profound.) One of these is the dialect of the Bedouin of the Eastern Desert and of the Sinai Peninsula; the Bedouin of the Western Desert constitute a separate dialect group. Upper Egypt has its own vernacular, markedly different from that of Cairo. The Cairo dialect is used, with variations, throughout the towns of the delta, but rural people have their own vernacular. Direct contact with foreigners over a long period has led to the incorporation of many loanwords into Cairene colloquial Arabic. (Cairo’s prominence as a centre of the Arab film industry has also ensured that its dialect is widely understood throughout the Arab world.) The long contact with foreigners and the existence of foreign-language schools also explain the polyglot character of Egyptian society. Most educated Egyptians are fluent in English or French or both, in addition to Arabic.

There are also other minor linguistic groups. The Beja of the southern section of the Eastern Desert use an Afro-Asiatic language of the Cushitic branch known as To Bedawi (though some speak Tigre and many use Arabic). At Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert there are groups whose language is related (but not too closely) to the Berber languages of the Afro-Asiatic family. Nubians speak Eastern Sudanic languages that, although technically of the Nilo-Saharan language family, contain some Cushitic features. There are other minority linguistic groups, notably Greek, Italian, and Armenian, although they are much smaller than they once were.

At the time of the Islamic conquest, the Coptic language, a latter incarnation of the ancient Egyptian language, was the medium of both religious and everyday life for the mass of the population. By the 12th century, however, Arabic had come into common use even among Christian Copts, whose former tongue continued only as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Religion

Islam is the official religion of Egypt, and nearly all Egyptian Muslims adhere to its Sunni branch. The country has long been a centre of Islamic scholarship, and al-Azhar University—located in Cairo—is widely considered the world’s preeminent institution of Islamic learning. Likewise, many Muslims, even those outside Egypt, consider al-Azhar’s sheikhs to be among the highest religious authorities in the Sunni world. The Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational religio-political organization that seeks to expand conservative Muslim values, was founded in Egypt in 1928. Sufism is also widely practiced.

 

Copts are far and away the largest Christian denomination in the country. In language, dress, and way of life they are indistinguishable from Muslim Egyptians; their church ritual and traditions, however, date from before the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Ever since it broke with the Eastern Church in the 5th century, the Coptic Orthodox Church has maintained its autonomy, and its beliefs and ritual have remained basically unchanged. The Copts have traditionally been associated with certain handicrafts and trades and, above all, with accountancy, banking, commerce, and the civil service; there are, however, rural communities that are wholly Coptic, as well as mixed Coptic-Muslim villages. The Copts are most numerous in the middle Nile valley governorates of Asyūṭ, Al-Minyā, and Qinā. About one-fourth of the total Coptic population lives in Cairo.

Among other religious communities are Coptic Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Catholic, Maronite, and Syrian Catholic churches as well as Anglicans and other Protestants. Few Jews remain in the country.

Settlement patterns

Physiographically, Egypt is usually divided into four major regions—the Nile valley and delta, the Eastern Desert, the Western Desert, and the Sinai Peninsula. When both physical and cultural characteristics are considered together, however, the country may be further divided into subregions—the Nile delta, the Nile valley from Cairo to south of Aswān, the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea coast, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Western Desert and its oases.

About half of the population of the delta are peasants (fellahin)—either small landowners or labourers—living on the produce of the land. The remainder live in towns or cities, the largest of which is Cairo. As a whole, they have had greater contact with the outside world, particularly with the rest of the Middle East and with Europe, than the inhabitants of the more remote southern valley and are generally less traditional and conservative than those in other regions of the country.

The inhabitants of the valley from Cairo up to Aswān governorate, the Ṣaʿīdīs, are more conservative than the delta people. In some areas women still do not appear in public without a veil; family honour is of great importance, and the vendetta remains an accepted (albeit illegal) means of resolving disputes between groups. Until the building of the High Dam, the Aswān governorate was one of the poorest regions in the valley and the most remote from outside influences. It has since experienced increased economic prosperity.

The majority of the sedentary population of the Eastern Desert lives in the few towns and settlements along the coast, the largest being Raʾs Ghārib. No accurate figures are available for the nomadic population, but they are believed to constitute about one-eighth of the region’s total population. They belong to various tribal groups, the most important being—from north to south—the Ḥuwayṭāt, Maʿāzah, ʿAbābdah, and Bishārīn. There are more true nomads in the Eastern Desert than the Western Desert because of the greater availability of pasture and water. They live either by herding goats, sheep, or camels or by trading—mainly with mining and petroleum camps or with the fishing communities on the coast.

Outside the oases, the habitable areas of the Western Desert, mainly near the coast, are occupied by the Awlād ʿAlī tribe. Apart from small groups of camel herders in the south, the population is no longer totally nomadic. Somewhat less than half are seminomadic herdsmen; the remainder are settled and, in addition to maintaining herds of sheep and goats, pursue such activities as fruit growing, fishing, trading, and handicrafts. The Western Desert supports a much larger population than the Eastern Desert. Marsā Maṭrūḥ, an important summer resort on the Mediterranean Sea, is the only urban centre. Other scattered communities are found mainly near railway stations and along the northern cultivated strip. The oases, though geographically a part of the Western Desert, are ethnically and culturally distinct. The southern oases of Al-Khārijah and Al-Dākhilah have been developed to some extent as part of a reclamation project centred on exploiting underground water resources. Other oases include Al-Farāfirah, Al-Baḥriyyah, and Siwa.

The majority of the population in the Sinai Peninsula are Arabs, many of whom have settled around Al-ʿArīsh and in the northern coastal area, although substantial numbers in the central plateau and the Sinai mountains continue to be nomadic or seminomadic. Another concentration of sedentary population is found at Al-Qanṭarah, on the east side of the Suez Canal.

Economy

Although the constitution of 1971 described the economy as one based on socialism, with the people controlling all means of production, the public sector thoroughly dominated the economy for only about two decades following the revolution of 1952—prior to which time the country had a free market. Most major nationalization took place between 1961 and the early 1970s, when most important sectors of the economy either were public or were strictly controlled by the government. This included large-scale industry, communications, banking and finance, the cotton trade, foreign trade as a whole, and other sectors. During that time, private enterprise came gradually to find its scope restricted, but some room to maneuver was still left in real estate and in agriculture and, later, in the export trade. Personal income, as well as land ownership, was strictly limited by the government.

Moreover, the government, when not actually in possession of the means of production, regulated all important aspects of production and distribution. It imposed controls on agricultural prices, controlled rent, ran the internal trade, restricted foreign travel and the use of foreign exchange, and appointed and supervised the boards of directors of corporations. The government initiated projects and allocated investment.

As part of the infitāḥ ("opening") economic policy adopted in the early 1970s, some of these restrictions were relaxed in the last quarter of the 20th century, permitting greater private-sector participation in various areas. Although the everyday running of corporations is now left to their boards of directors, those boards receive instructions from public boards, and the chairmen of boards often coordinate their production policies with the appropriate state minister. The government formulates five-year development plans to guide economic development. Likewise, since the early 1970s, the Egyptian government has campaigned for increased foreign investment—initially receiving financial aid from the oil-rich Arab states. Although Arab aid was suspended as a punitive measure after Egypt signed a 1979 peace treaty with Israel (see Camp David Accords), the subsequent return of several Western and Japanese corporations, encouraged by the normalization of Egyptian relations with Israel, increased the potential for further foreign investment in the country. Much of the effort exerted by the government in the early 1980s was devoted to adjusting the economy to the situation resulting from the 1979 treaty. Defense expenditures were reduced, and increased allocations were made available for developing roads, bridges, oil pipelines, telephone lines, and other infrastructure. Egypt’s economy began to become more resilient, primarily because of new oil and natural gas discoveries but also because Western aid increased. In the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, Egypt’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) rose markedly, as the government sought to raise domestic production and foreign trade.

However, the economy has continued to face many hurdles. The general standard of living in Egypt remains rather low, and in relation to the size of its population, its economic resources are limited. Land remains its main source of natural wealth, but the amount of productive land is insufficient to support the population adequately. Increases in population have put pressure on resources, producing chronic underemployment, and many Egyptians have sought employment abroad. Political uncertainty in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising that toppled Pres. Hosni Mubarak had a negative effect on most sectors of the economy, with the worst impacts being felt in tourism, construction, and manufacturing.

Agriculture and fishing

About 96 percent of Egypt’s total area is desert. Lack of forests, permanent meadows, or pastures places a heavy burden on the available arable land, which constitutes only about 3 percent of the total area. This limited area, which sustains on the average 8 persons per acre (20 per hectare), is, however, highly fertile and is cropped more than once a year.

Agriculture remains an important sector of the Egyptian economy. It contributes nearly one-eighth of the GDP, employs roughly one-fourth of the labour force, and provides the country—through agricultural exports—with an important part of its foreign exchange. The rapid increase in Egypt’s population prompted an intensification of cultivation almost without parallel elsewhere. Heavy capital is invested in the form of canals, drains, dams, water pumps, and barrages; the investment of skilled labour, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides is also great. Strict crop rotation—in addition to government controls on the allocation of area to crops, on varieties planted, on the distribution of fertilizers and pesticides, and on marketing—contributes to high agricultural yield.

Unlike the situation in comparable developing countries, Egyptian agriculture is geared overwhelmingly toward commercial rather than subsistence production. Field crops contribute some three-fourths of the total value of Egypt’s agricultural production, while the rest comes from livestock products, fruits and vegetables, and other specialty crops. Egypt has two seasons of cultivation, one for winter and another for summer crops. The main summer field crop is cotton, which absorbs much of the available labour and represents a notable portion of the value of exports. Egypt is the world’s principal producer of long-staple cotton (1.125 inches [2.85 cm] and longer), normally supplying about one-third of the world crop; total Egyptian cotton production, however, constitutes just a tiny fraction of the global yield.

Among other principal field crops are corn (maize), rice, wheat, sorghum, and fava (broad) beans (fūl). Despite a considerable output, the cereal production in Egypt falls short of the country’s total consumption needs; a substantial proportion of foreign exchange is spent annually on the import of cereals and milling products. Other important crops include sugarcane, tomatoes, sugar beets, potatoes, and onions. Many varieties of fruit are grown, and some, such as citrus, are exported.

 

Until the completion of the Aswān High Dam in 1970, the pattern of inundation and falling water, of high Nile and low Nile, established the Egyptian year and controlled the lives of the Egyptian farmers—and most Egyptians were tied to a life on the land—from birth to death, from century to century. On the regular behaviour of the Nile rested the prosperity, the very continuity, of the land. The three seasons of the Egyptian year were even named after the land conditions produced by the river: akhet, the “inundation”; peret, the season when the land emerged from the flood; and shomu, the time when water was short. When the Nile behaved as expected, which most commonly was the case, life went on as normal; when the flood failed or was excessive, disaster followed.

Construction of the Aswān High Dam enabled not only control of the Nile’s floods but also the reclamation of vast tracts of land for farming. The total land reclaimed as a result of the Aswān High Dam project reached more than 1,000,000 acres (400,000 hectares) by 1975, in addition to some 700,000 acres (284,000 hectares) converted from basin (one crop per year) irrigation to perennial irrigation. During the same period, however, an agricultural area almost as large was lost to industry and growing towns. Conscious of the need to conserve and to increase arable land, the Egyptian government has encouraged the establishment of new settlements in desert areas and has promoted projects to bring large areas of unproductive desert under cultivation. The New Valley project, begun in 1997, was initially slated to bring roughly 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) under production in the southern Western Desert by pumping water from Lake Nasser through a long canal. Its most important structure, the Mubarak Pumping Station, was completed in 2005, but only a fraction of the projected land area was brought under production after two decades. Similar programs have been undertaken in the western delta and the Sinai Peninsula, and a project to make more than 1,500,000 acres (630,000 hectares) of desert cultivable was inaugurated in 2015.

Egypt has been the scene of one of the most successful attempts at land reform. In 1952 a limit of 200 acres (80 hectares) was imposed on individual ownership of land, and this was lowered to 100 acres (40 hectares) in 1961 and to 50 acres (20 hectares) in 1969. By 1975 less than one-eighth of the total cultivated area was held by owners with 50 acres or more. The success of Egyptian land reform is indicated by the substantial rise of land yields after 1952. This was partly the result of several complementary measures of agrarian reform, such as regulation of land tenure and rent control, that accompanied the redistribution of the land. Rent control has since been discontinued for land and new constructions but remains in effect for older real estate.

Egypt’s biological resources, centred around the Nile, have long been one of its principal assets. There are no forests or any permanent vegetation of economic significance apart from the land under cultivation. Water buffalo, cattle, asses, goats, and sheep are the most important livestock. Although animal husbandry and poultry production have been promoted by the government, growth has been sluggish.

Following the construction of the Aswān High Dam, the Egyptian government encouraged the development of a fishing industry. Construction of such projects as a fish farm and fishery complex at Lake Nasser have led to a considerable increase in the number of freshwater fish and in the size of the yearly total catch. At the same time, catches of sea fish in the waters off the Nile delta have declined, because of the change in the flow and character of Nile water after the construction of the Aswān High Dam.

Resources and power

Compared with the physical size of the country and the level of its population, Egypt has scanty mineral resources. The search for petroleum began earlier in Egypt than elsewhere in the Middle East, and production on a small scale began as early as 1908, but it was not until the mid-1970s that significant results were achieved, notably in the Gulf of Suez and portions of the Western Desert. By the early 1980s Egypt had become an important oil producer, although total production was relatively small by Middle Eastern standards.

The bulk of Egypt’s petroleum comes from the Morgan, Ramadan, and July fields (both onshore and offshore) in the Gulf of Suez, which are operated by the Gulf of Suez Petroleum Company (commonly known as Gupco), and from the Abū Rudays area of the Sinai on the Gulf of Suez. Egypt also extracts oil from fields at Al-ʿAlamayn (El-Alamein) and Razzāq in the Western Desert. Active drilling for oil, involving several international interests, including those of the United States and several European countries, has continued in both the Eastern and the Western deserts, with marked success during the 1990s and early 21st century.

In the process of searching for oil, some significant natural gas deposits have been located, including substantial deposits in the delta and in the Western Desert, as well as offshore under the Mediterranean Sea. Wells have been established in the Abū Qīr area, northeast of Alexandria. A joint Egyptian-Italian gas discovery was made in the north delta near Abū Māḍī in 1970; this was developed partly to supply a fertilizer plant and partly to fuel the industrial centres in the north and northwest delta. In 1974 Abū Māḍī became the first Egyptian gas field to begin production. Other natural gas fields are located in the Western Desert, the delta, the Mediterranean shelf, and the Gulf of Suez, and by the early 21st century natural gas production had begun to rival that of oil, both as a source for domestic consumption and as a commodity for export.

Egypt has several oil refineries, two of which are located at Suez. The first of Egypt’s twin crude pipelines, linking the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean Sea near Alexandria, was opened in 1977. This Suez-Mediterranean pipeline, known as Sumed, has the capacity to transmit some 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. The Sumed pipeline was financed by a consortium of Arab countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. In 1981 a crude oil pipeline was opened to link Raʾs Shukhayr, on the Red Sea coast, with the refinery at Musṭurud, north of Cairo. Additional oil pipelines link Musṭurud with Alexandria, and fields near Hurghada to terminals on the Red Sea.

Several of Egypt’s major known phosphate deposits are mined at Isnā, Ḥamrāwayn, and Safājah. Coal deposits are located in the partially developed Maghārah mines in the Sinai Peninsula. Mines located in the Eastern Desert have been the primary source for manganese production since 1967, and there are also reserves of manganese on the Sinai Peninsula. Iron ore is extracted from deposits at Aswān, and development work has continued at Al-Baḥriyyah Oasis. Chromium, uranium, and gold deposits are also found in the country.

The Nile constitutes an incomparable source of hydroelectric energy. Before the completion of the Aswān High Dam power station in 1970, only a small volume of Egyptian electricity was generated by hydropower, with thermal plants burning diesel fuel or coal being the principal producers. For several years after the High Dam station went into operation, most of the country’s electricity was generated there. Its original 12 turbines have a generating capacity of about 2 million kilowatts; the Aswān II hydroelectric power station (completed 1986) has added another 270,000 kilowatts of capacity to the system. Actual power production from the High Dam has been limited, however, by the need to reconcile demands for power with the demands for irrigation water. Moreover, Egypt’s booming population and growing need for energy has forced the government to construct additional thermal plants, many of them fueled by the country’s abundant reserves of natural gas. Thermal plants now generate some four-fifths of the country’s electricity.

Manufacturing of Egypt

During the 20th century, manufacturing grew to be one of the largest sectors of Egypt’s economy, accounting (along with mining) for roughly one-fourth of the GDP by the 21st century. Domestic manufactures were weak from the late 19th century until about 1930 because of free trade policies that favoured importing foreign products. Motivated by the need to increase national income, to diversify the economy, and to satisfy the aspirations of nascent nationalism, the government imposed a customs tariff on foreign goods in 1930 that promoted the development of Egyptian manufactures. The Bank of Egypt also extended loans to Egyptian entrepreneurs in the 1920s and ’30s to help stimulate Egyptian domestic production. A succession of companies were founded that engaged in printing, cotton ginning, transport, spinning and weaving (linen, silk, and cotton), vegetable oil extraction, and the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and rayon. Egypt was a major Allied base during World War II (1939–45) but was largely cut off from European imports; this situation further fueled the development of manufacturing, particularly of textile products.

Most large-scale manufacturing establishments were nationalized beginning in the 1950s, and emphasis was placed on developing heavy industry after a long-term trade and aid agreement was reached with the Soviet Union in 1964. Another aid agreement with the Soviets in 1970 provided for the expansion of an iron and steel complex at Ḥulwān and for the establishment of a number of power-based industries, including an aluminum complex that uses power generated by the High Dam. An ammonium nitrate plant was opened in 1971, based on gases generated in the coking unit of the steel mill at Ḥulwān. There is also a nitrate fertilizer plant at Aswān.

By the beginning of the 21st century, most large manufacturing enterprises were still owned or operated by the state, although the government had begun to sell substantial holdings to the private sector. Major manufactures included chemicals of all sorts (including pharmaceuticals), food products, textiles and garments, cement and other building materials, and paper products as well as derivatives of hydrocarbons (including fuel oil, gasoline, lubricants, jet fuel, and asphalt). Iron, steel, and automobiles were of growing importance to the Egyptian economy.

Finance

Modern banking activities date from the mid-19th century. The Bank of Egypt opened in 1858 and the Anglo-Egyptian Bank in 1864. The French bank Crédit Lyonnais began operations in Egypt in 1866, followed by the Ottoman Bank (1867) and then other French, Italian, and Greek banks. The National Bank of Egypt (1898) and the Agricultural Bank of Egypt (1902) were founded with British capital. The first purely Egyptian Bank was the Banque Misr (1920).

From its inception the National Bank of Egypt assumed the main functions of a central bank, a status that was confirmed by law in 1951. In 1957 all English and French banks and insurance companies were nationalized and taken over by various Egyptian joint-stock companies; thereafter, all shareholders, directors, and managers of those financial institutions were bound by law to be Egyptian citizens. Banque Misr, long responsible for controlling a number of industrial companies in addition to conducting ordinary banking business, was nationalized in 1960. As of 1961 the National Bank of Egypt—which had also been nationalized in 1960—was divided into a commercial bank that maintained the original name and the Central Bank of Egypt, which functioned as a central bank. Later that year, all remaining financial institutions were nationalized, and their operations were concentrated in five commercial banks, in addition to the central bank, the government-sponsored Public Organization for Agricultural Credits and Co-operatives, the Development Industrial Bank, and three mortgage banks. The national currency, the Egyptian pound (Arabic: ginīh), is issued by the central bank.

The government again reorganized the banking system in the early 1970s, merging some of the major banks and assigning special functions to each of the rest. Two new banks were created, and foreign banks were again permitted in the country as part of a program aimed at liberalizing the economy. Of particular interest were joint banking ventures between Egyptian and foreign banks. In 1980 Egypt’s first international bank since the revolution was opened and a national investment bank was established. Islamic banks have been set up in Egypt, paying dividends to their investors instead of interest, which is proscribed under Islamic law. In 1992 the stock exchanges at Cairo (1903) and Alexandria (1881), which had been closed since the early 1960s, were reopened, and in 1997 they were fully merged as the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange.

The supply of money has, in general, followed the development of the economy; the authorities have aimed at tolerable increases in the price level, although some prices soared during the 1970s and ’80s. Long pegged to the U.S. dollar, the pound was allowed to float in January 2003.

Egypt is a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since World War II the international liquidity of the Egyptian economy, including the Special Drawing Rights, added in 1970, has been depressed. In the late 1970s both internal and external debts rose, primarily because of large government subsidies to the private sector. In the 1980s and ’90s the government gradually introduced price increases on goods and services, effectively reducing (though not eliminating) subsidies for food and fuel. In 1991 Egypt signed an agreement with the IMF and the World Bank called the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program, which reduced the fiscal deficit, removed consumer subsidies, eliminated price controls, liberalized trade, reformed labour laws, and privatized state-owned enterprises. Although the program strengthened Egypt’s economy during the 1990s, economic growth slowed in the early 21st century.

Trade of Egypt

The value of imports into Egypt is usually equal to about one-third and exports about one-tenth of the GDP. Since World War II exports have tended to fall short of imports. The trade deficit was particularly sizable from 1960 to 1965 as expenditure on development rose, reaching a peak in 1966. After the 1973 war with Israel, there was a decided effort to restrict imports and stimulate exports, but this met with little success. The trade deficit rose to record highs in the early and mid-1980s, largely because of the decline in revenue from petroleum exports and the increase in food imports. These problems have persisted in the early 21st century. The large visible trade deficit was partially offset by transfers from abroad, such as aid from Western governments and remittances from Egyptians working in other countries.

Nearly two-fifths of imports consist of raw materials, mineral and chemical products, and capital goods (machinery, electrical apparatuses, and transport equipment), some one-fifth are foodstuffs, and the remainder are other consumer goods. Its most important exports include petroleum and petroleum products, followed by raw cotton, cotton yarn, and textiles. Raw materials, mineral and chemical products, and capital goods are also exported. Among agricultural exports are rice, onions, garlic, and citrus fruit. Egypt’s most important trading partners include China, the United States, Italy, Germany, and the Gulf Arab countries.

Services

The service sector—including retail sales, tourism, and government services—is one of the largest in the economy. The government alone is one of the biggest employers in the country, and government contracts help fuel other sectors of Egypt’s still heavily socialized economy. Despite privatization and fiscal austerity measures in the late 20th century, construction projects, particularly major public-works projects, have been an important source of employment and a major source of national spending. Tourism has traditionally been an important source of foreign exchange, with millions visiting Egypt each year, mostly from Europe, Asia, and other Arab countries. Warm winters, beaches, and gambling casinos draw as many tourists as do Egypt’s ancient monuments. Although the number of tourists per year and the amount they spend in Egypt rose in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, security problems have at times hurt the industry. The 1997 massacre of dozens of tourists at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor caused visitor numbers to dip briefly. A steeper and longer-lasting drop in tourism followed the uprising that overthrew Pres. Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but began recovering rapidly in 2018.

Labour and taxation

Nearly one-fourth of the population derives its living from agriculture, although a growing proportion of the labour force—more than one-tenth—is engaged in manufacturing and mining. Most of the rest of the working population is employed in the service, trade, finance, and transportation sectors. Because of the shortage of land, labour underemployment began to be manifest in agriculture early in the 20th century. Since then the development of nonagricultural jobs has failed to keep pace with a rapidly growing labour force, and unemployment grew during the 1990s as the government shed large numbers of unproductive positions from the bureaucracy as part of a fiscal austerity policy. The rural population, especially landless agricultural labourers, has the lowest standard of living in the country. The salaries of professional groups are also low. Industrial and urban workers enjoy, on the whole, a higher standard. The highest wages are earned in petroleum, manufacturing, and other industries, where many workers receive additional benefits of social insurance and extra health and housing facilities. To some extent, low wages had been partly offset by the low cost of living, but since the late 1970s this advantage has been neutralized by persistent high inflation rates.

Beginning in 1976, trade unions were closely controlled by the government through the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) and umbrella organizations with close ties to the government. Hundreds of independent trade unions sprang up after President Mubarak’s removal, but board elections that would enable these unions to be formalized were continuously delayed. When elections were finally held in 2018, the process was tightly restricted by the state, and the ETUF remained dominant. Trade unions are often vocally active in national policy making but are seldom the instrument for negotiating higher wages or better work conditions. Labour legislation of the early 21st century has legalized some strikes, provided the union gives advance notice. However, unauthorized strikes also have taken place. There are well-defined rules regarding child labour—children as young as age 12 may work in seasonal agriculture, and children age 14 and older may engage in industrial work part-time only—but authorities have found these rules difficult to enforce. In farm families, for instance, everyone works, and even Egyptians who have left rural life may still regard children as economic assets. Discrimination based on gender is illegal, but social custom has rendered a wide variety of occupations inaccessible to women. As in many Islamic countries, the workweek is Sunday through Thursday. Since the 1960s, several new employers’ associations have arisen, and the Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI; 1922) has regained powers it once lost, such as the authority to reject government-proposed trade boycotts.

With the majority of the population earning very low incomes, direct taxation falls on the few wealthy; income-tax rates are made sharply progressive in an attempt to achieve a degree of equality in income distribution. Nevertheless, the income gap between rich and poor Egyptians has widened noticeably since the 1960s. Direct taxes on income, mostly levied on businesses, account for about one-fourth of governmental revenue. Sales taxes generate more than one-third of revenue.

Government and society

Egypt has operated under several constitutions, both as a monarchy and, after 1952, as a republic. The first and most liberal of these was the 1923 constitution, which was promulgated just after Britain declared Egypt’s independence. That document laid the political and cultural groundwork for modern Egypt, declaring it an independent sovereign Islamic state with Arabic as its language. The vote was extended to all adult males. This constitution provided for a bicameral parliament, an independent judiciary, and a strong executive in the form of the king. In 1930 this constitution was replaced by another one, which gave even more powers to the king and his ministers. Following vigorous protest, it was abrogated five years later. The 1923 constitution again came into force but was permanently abolished after the revolution in 1952. The Republic of Egypt was declared in 1953. The new ruling junta—led by a charismatic army officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser—abolished all political parties, which had operated with relative freedom under the monarchy, and a new constitution, in which women were granted the franchise, was introduced in 1956. To replace the abolished political parties, the regime formed the National Union in 1957—from 1962 the Arab Socialist Union (ASU)—which dominated political life in Egypt for the next 15 years. An interim constitution was promulgated in 1964.

At the heart of the postrevolutionary regime was a commitment to Pan-Arabism, the nationalist philosophy that called for the establishment of a single Arab state, and during the following decades Egypt engaged in several abortive attempts to forge transnational unions with other Arab countries. In 1958 Egypt and Syria were merged into one state, called the United Arab Republic, a name that was retained by Egypt for a decade after Syria’s secession in 1961. In 1971 Egypt, Libya, and Syria agreed to establish the Federation of Arab Republics, but the federation never actually materialized. The capital of the federation would be Cairo. In 1977, however, deteriorating relations between Egypt and other Arab states over Egypt’s peace negotiations with Israel led to the end of the federation and to Egypt’s suspension from the Arab League, a regional organization of which it had been a founding member.

In 1971 a new Egyptian constitution was adopted by referendum to replace the interim constitution of 1964. It was amended in 1980, 2005, and 2007. In 2005 Egypt held its first presidential election in which multiple candidates vied for the office and which was conducted by popular vote. Prior to that time, a single candidate had been chosen by the legislature and then confirmed by national plebiscite.

The 1971 constitution was suspended in February 2011, following a popular uprising that forced the resignation of Pres. Hosni Mubarak. An interim constitutional declaration was issued on March 30, 2011, by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Egypt’s interim military government). It incorporated provisions from the 1971 constitution as well as new measures, approved by referendum in March 2011, to make elections more open, impose presidential term limits, and restrict the use of emergency laws. The constitutional declaration also included provisions for legislative and presidential elections and for the drafting of a new permanent constitution.

In 2012 a 100-member Constituent Assembly was appointed by the newly elected legislature to write a draft constitution to be approved by a national referendum. Because Islamist parties had won a more than two-thirds majority in the legislature, Islamists were appointed to the majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly. Tensions between the Islamist bloc and a loose minority coalition of liberal, secular, and Christian members of the assembly quickly developed into a deadlock over questions of human rights and the role of religion in the state, and the Islamist majority ultimately passed a draft constitution in spite of legal challenges and walkouts by the opposition. The constitution was approved in a national referendum in December 2012.

The 2012 constitution was suspended in July 2013, when Pres. Mohamed Morsi was removed from power following several days of massive demonstrations against his rule. An interim administration led by the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court was created to govern the country. In September the new administration convened a 50-member panel to replace the 2012 constitution.

The new constitution, approved by Egyptian voters in January 2014, left out much of the conservative religious language featured in the 2012 document. A series of amendments were approved in a referendum in 2019. Among other provisions, they extended presidential terms and reestablished an upper chamber of the legislature (originally eliminated from the 2014 constitution).

Local government

Until 1960 all government administration was highly centralized, but in that year a system of local governance was established to decentralize administration and promote greater citizen participation at the local level. The 1960 Local Administration Law provides for three levels of subnational administration—muḥāfaẓāt (governorates; singular muḥāfaẓah), markaz (districts or counties), and qariyyah (villages). The structure combines features of both local administration and local self-government. There are two councils at each administrative level: an elected people’s council and an executive council that is appointed. Although these councils exercise broad legislative powers, they are controlled by the central government.

The country is divided into 27 governorates. Four cities—Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez—have governorate status. The governor is appointed and can be dismissed by the president of the republic. The governor is the highest executive authority in the governorate, has administrative authority over all government personnel except judges in the governorate, and is responsible for implementing policy.

The governorate council is composed of a majority of elected members. According to law, at least half of the members of the governorate council are to be farmers and workers. In practice, however, it has not been possible to achieve this ratio, in part because farmers work long hours with little spare time to run for office, let alone attend long meetings. Moreover, many older farmers and workers do not have a high enough level of formal education to serve effectively. The town or district councils and the village councils are established on the same principles as those underlying the governorate councils.

Governorate and local councils perform a wide variety of functions in education, health, public utilities, housing, agriculture, and communications; they are also responsible for promoting the cooperative movement and for implementing parts of the national plan. Local councils obtain their funds from national revenue, a tax on real estate within the governorate, miscellaneous local taxes or fees, profits from public utilities and commercial enterprises, and national subsidies, grants, and loans.

Justice

The 2014 constitution emphasizes the independent nature of the judiciary. There is to be no external interference with the due processes of justice. Judges are subject to no authority other than the law; they cannot be dismissed and are disciplined in the manner prescribed by law. Judges are appointed by the state, with the prior approval of the Supreme Judicial Council. The council is also responsible for the affairs of all judicial bodies; its composition and special functions are specified by law.

The court structure can be regarded as falling into four categories, each of which has a civil and criminal division. These courts of general jurisdiction include district tribunals, tribunals of the first instance, courts of appeal, and the Court of Cassation; the latter is the highest court of appeal and has the power to override the rulings of lower courts. Court sessions are public, except where consideration of matters of public order or decency decides otherwise. Sentence is passed in open session.

In addition, there are special courts, such as military courts and courts of public security—the latter dealing with crimes against the well-being or security of the state. The Council of State is a separate judicial body, dealing especially with administrative disputes and disciplinary actions. The Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo is the highest court in Egypt. Its functions include judicial review of the constitutionality of laws and regulations and the resolution of judicial conflicts among the courts.

Egypt was the first Arab country to abolish communal courts based on religion (1956). Personal status issues—such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance—are now adjudicated by civil courts, though these courts still take into consideration the statutes of Sharīʿah (Islamic law), the Coptic Orthodox Church, and other Christian institutions. The civil and penal codes as well as court procedure are based on French law, but these are influenced by Sharīʿah.

Health and welfare

The budget of the Ministry of Health has reflected an increasing expenditure on public-health programs, especially since the 1990s. The numbers of government health centres, beds in public hospitals, doctors, and dentists have increased significantly. An important aspect of health-care development in Egypt always has been the expansion of facilities in the rural areas. In the mid-20th century, rural people had access to health care primarily through a local facility that functioned simultaneously as a health centre, school, social-welfare unit, and agricultural extension station. By the early 21st century, hundreds of hospitals and thousands of smaller health units were serving rural communities. The quality of these facilities was often low, however, prompting many rural residents to seek treatment at Islamic health care centres, which were generally superior to those of the government.

Well-trained physicians and specialists are available in large numbers in the cities and larger towns. The medical profession has prestige, and only the better qualified high school graduates are accepted into medical schools.

Significant efforts have been made to promote preventive medicine. Compulsory vaccination against hepatitis B, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis is enforced for all infants during their first 18 months. Schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that is widespread among the rural population, presents a serious health problem. All health centres offer treatment against it, but reinfection can easily occur. Egypt undertook a campaign to fight malaria in the early 19th century; in 2024 it was certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as malaria-free. Attention has also been given to the problem of tuberculosis; centres have been established in every governorate, and mass X-ray and immunization campaigns have been carried out.

The government has attempted to socialize medicine through such measures as nationalizing and controlling pharmaceutical industries, nationalizing hospitals run by private organizations and associations, and expanding health insurance. Since the 1970s, however, private hospitals and clinics have outstripped the quality of state-run facilities. A health insurance law, passed in 1964, provides for compulsory health coverage for workers in firms employing more than 100 persons, as well as for all governmental and public employees. Poorer Egyptians often seek medical care at clinics or hospitals run by Islamic groups.

Cultural life

Daily life and social customs

The population density of the inhabited area is such that the presence of people is obvious everywhere, even in the open countryside. In the early morning and the late afternoon, the fellahin can be seen in large numbers on the roads, going to or coming from the fields with their farm animals. During the entire day, the men, with their long tunics, or djellabas (gallābiyyahs), tucked up around the waist, can be seen working the land with age-old implements such as the fās (hoe) and minjal (sickle); occasionally a modern tractor is seen. In the delta older women in long black robes, younger ones in more colourful cottons, and children over age 6 help with the less strenuous tasks. In some parts of the valley, however, women over age 16 do not work in the field, and their activities are confined to the household. They seldom appear in public except with a black muslin headdress covering their heads and faces. Young children can be seen everywhere—an omnipresent reminder of the country’s high birth rate.

Lifestyles in the larger cities vary greatly from those of the countryside and are, in many ways, more akin to patterns found in urban culture worldwide. Although modesty is maintained in urban modes of dress—particularly given the tendency from the early 1980s onward for women to return to wearing the hijab—urban clothing styles differ only marginally from those found in many European cities. Likewise, foreign manners and values, mostly Western, have heavily influenced urban tastes in art, literature, cuisine, and other areas.

Throughout Egypt, the family remains the most important link in the social chain. In rural areas, particularly among the Saʿīdī of Upper Egypt and the Bedouin of the deserts, tribal identity is still strong, and great stock is put into blood relationships. There, where the control of the state is weakest, the vendetta is still a pervasive threat to civil order. Tribal affiliations are all but extinct in urban areas, but even there the day-to-day navigation of state bureaucracy and business relationships is commonly facilitated by extensive patronage systems linking the local family with far-reaching groups of relatives and friends.

Foreign influences on Egyptian cuisine as a whole have come mostly from other areas of the Mediterranean, including Greece, Turkey, and the Levant. Urban tastes, however, have been most heavily and diversely influenced from abroad. Rural tastes are represented by such dishes as fūl mudammis (ful medmes), consisting of slowly cooked fava (broad) beans and spices that is usually served with side dishes and bread and is widely considered the national food. Also much loved is mulūkhiyyah, a thick, gelatinous soup based on the leaf of the Jew’s mallow (Corchorus olitorius) that is served with meat or fowl. Kuftah, a type of spiced meatball, is also common fare. Two types of bread predominate: a whole-grain flatbread known as ʿaysh baladī (“native bread”), and a variety from refined flour known as ʿaysh shāmī (“Syrian bread”). Falafel, a fried cake of legumes, is a staple throughout the region and probably originated in Egypt. Because of the country’s dominant riverine culture, fish are prevalent, but they do not make up an enormous part of the diet. As in other countries of the Middle East, mutton is the most commonly consumed meat. Chicken is ubiquitous, and pigeon is extremely popular as a delicacy (with pigeon cotes a common sight in many villages). Some desserts have been adapted from Turkish dishes, which can be seen in the common use of the paper-thin sheets of phyllo pastry in them. Honey is the most common sweetener, and native fruits—particularly figs and dates—are used in most puddings and other desserts. Although the consumption of alcoholic beverages is proscribed under Islam, locally brewed and fermented drinks are found, and some are imported. Coffee and tea are popular refreshments.

Egyptians celebrate a number of secular and religious holidays. The former include Labor Day, Revolution Day (1952), and Armed Forces Day. Religious holidays include the two ʿīds (Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr), the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid), and Coptic Christmas (January 7).

The arts of Egypt

Egypt is one of the Arab world’s literary centres and has produced many of modern Arabic literature’s foremost writers. The impact of the West is one of the recurring themes in the modern Egyptian novel, as in Tawfīq Ḥakīm’s Bird of the East (1943) and Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s novella The Lamp of Umm Hashim (1944). A further theme is that of the Egyptian countryside—depicted romantically at first, as in Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Zaynab (1913), and later realistically, as in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqāwī’s The Land (1954) and The Peasant (1968) and in Yūsuf Idrīs’s Al-Ḥarām (1959; “The Forbidden”). A capacity to catch the colour of life among the urban poor is a characteristic quality of the early and middle work of Egypt’s greatest modern novelist, Naguib Mahfouz (Najīb Maḥfūẓ), notably in Midaq Alley (1947). Mahfouz later won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Cairo Trilogy (1956–57). Egyptian novelists continued to enjoy critical and popular success in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with authors such as Sonallah Ibrahim, Nawal El Saadawi, Bahaa Taher, and Alaa Al Aswany rising to international prominence.

The modern theatre in Egypt is a European importation—the first Arabic-language plays were performed in 1870. Two dramatists, both born at the turn of the 20th century, dominated its development—Maḥmūd Taymūr and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm. The latter, a versatile and cerebral playwright, has reflected in his themes not only the development of the modern theatre but also, in embryo, the cultural and social history of modern Egypt. The changes in Egyptian society are reflected in the themes adopted by younger dramatists.

With the country’s low rates of literacy, electronic media have played an important role in spreading mass popular culture. Egyptian television has had a powerful influence on regional tastes, and viewers throughout the Arab world tune in to Egyptian programs. The country’s most popular actors enjoy wide recognition abroad.

There is a relatively long tradition of filmmaking in Egypt dating to World War I, but it was the founding of Miṣr Studios in 1934 that stimulated the growth of the Arabic-language cinema. Modern Egyptian films are shown to audiences throughout the Arab world and are also distributed in Asian and African countries. The industry is owned privately and by the state—there are many private film-production companies, as well as the Ministry of Culture’s Egyptian General Cinema Corporation. Outside Egypt, the best-known Egyptian director is Youssef Chahine, whose career as a film director spanned more than 50 years. Others include Salah Abu Sayf and Muhammad Khan. Actor Omar Sharif, who was well known among Western moviegoers of the 1960s and ’70s, first emerged as an Egyptian film celebrity in 1954 and continued to star in Egyptian films into the 21st century. Prominent singers and composers such as Umm Kulthūm, Layla Murad, Farid al-Atrash, and Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab also earned immense sums for their movie acting. Notable films include Flirtation of Girls (1949), Cairo Station (1958), Terrorism and the Kebab (1993), and Nasser 56 (1996).

Music and dance have long played an important part in Egyptian culture. Given the country’s ethnic heterogeneity, traditional Egyptian musical styles are quite diverse. Yet the types of instruments found throughout the country are similar to those used elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. They include the ʿūd, qānūn (a type of zither), nāy (flute), riqq (tambourine), and rabāb (type of two-string fiddle). Although much Egyptian music might suggest a minor key to the Western ear, numerous genres and repertoires employing an array of scales (or melodic frameworks) in fact yield great musical variety. Many religious groups technically eschew music, but musical traditions are ubiquitous. Muslims of the Sufi branch, for instance, are noted for their dhikr, communal repetition of the names of God, often with instrumental accompaniment and dancing. Especially in the rural south, the zār is a common purification ceremony involving singing, dancing, and playing of musical instruments. Although the muezzin’s call to prayer and the recitation of the Qurʾān have obvious melodic qualities, these practices stand in a category separate from, and not to be confused with, that of music. Nevertheless, famous Qurʾān reciters frequently have mass followings similar to those of pop stars. A variety of martial dances have been practiced by groups throughout the country, particularly among Bedouin tribes, and in earlier generations, a class of female singers known as ʿawālim (singular ʿālimah, “learned”) thrived in urban areas, performing in private venues and in the salons of the elite. During this same period, bawdy female street dancers known as ghawāzī (singular ghāziyyah) were seen as disreputable, yet that term today is often applied with much less disapprobation to women who practice rural dances. The art of raqs sharqī (“eastern dance”)—or belly dancing, as it is known in the West—thrives among a class of professional dancers who entertain at weddings, birthdays, and other holidays.

Contemporary Egyptian music embraces indigenous forms, traditional Arab music, and Western-style music. The revival of traditional Arab music, both vocal and instrumental, owes much to state sponsorship. The advent of musical recordings and, later, of radio and motion pictures fueled the rise of popular stars. The first of these was Sayyid Darwīsh (1892–1923). Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (c. 1900–91) was one of the leading figures in the development of this genre, as both a composer and a singer. Umm Kulthūm (1904–75) was the leading female vocalist not only of Egypt but also of the whole Arab world for almost 50 years. ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ (1929–77) had a successful career as both a singer and an actor. Western-style music has been a familiar component in Egyptian musical culture since the 19th century. Pioneers such as Yūsuf Greiss (1905–61) and Abū Bakr Khayrat (1910–63) succeeded in incorporating Arab elements into their Western-style compositions to give them a national colour.

A return to local lore as a source of inspiration for the arts is a generalized phenomenon in modern Egyptian culture. It has resulted in a revived interest in traditional crafts, in the collection of indigenous music, and the maintaining, with government sponsorship, of two folkloric dance ensembles—the Riḍā Troupe and the National Folk Dance Ensemble. In the visual arts the innovative and striking use of local themes gave rise to an active school of Egyptian painting and sculpture. An early product of the new aesthetic was The Awakening of Egypt (1928), a statue by Maḥmūd Mukhtār, which stands in front of Cairo University.

Egypt has one of the richest architectural traditions in the world, one that spans thousands of years and includes edifices from the Pharaonic, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine, Islamic, and European traditions. Numerous locations in the country have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites for both their historic and architectural significance. From the ancient world, these locations include the ruins of the ancient city of Memphis and its necropolis, located south of Cairo, and adjacent pyramid fields—including the Pyramids of Giza and the stepped pyramid at Dahshūr; the city and necropolis at Thebes in Upper Egypt, including such prominent features as the nearby villages of Karnak and Luxor and the many tombs and ruins associated with the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens; and a series of monuments running from the ones at Abu Simbel to the Nile island of Philae in far southern Egypt. Sites from the Roman and Byzantine periods include the early Christian church of St. Menas (Abū Mīnā) near Alexandria and the Byzantine monastery of Saint Catherine’s on Mount Sinai. From the Islamic period, the old city of Cairo—often termed Islamic Cairo—is replete with prominent mosques, citadels, madrasahs, and bathhouses and fountains.

Contemporary European influences can be seen, particularly in Alexandria and Cairo, where sections of each city’s corniche are fronted by townhouses, hotels, and mansions of a distinctly European design. In all of the major cities, there are sections where such styles are dominant. Western influence can also be seen in many public buildings—particularly those from the colonial period—such as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (1900). Ultramodern structures include the new incarnation of the ancient Library of Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina (opened 2002). There has also been a movement, beginning in the late 20th century, to combine European and Islamic architectural styles in new construction.

History

This section presents the history of Egypt from the Islamic conquests of the 7th century ce until the present day. For a discussion of Egypt’s earlier history, see Egypt, ancient.

From the Islamic conquest to 1250

The period of Egyptian history between the advent of Islam and Egypt’s entrance into the modern period opens and closes with foreign conquests: the Arab invasion led by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in 639–642 ce and the Napoleonic expedition of 1798 mark the beginning and end of the era. Within the context of Egyptian internal history alone, this era was one in which Egypt cast off the heritage of the past to embrace a new language and a new religion—in other words, a new culture. While it is true that the past was by no means immediately and completely abandoned and that many aspects of Egyptian life, especially rural life, continued virtually unchanged, it is nevertheless clear that the civilization of Islamic Egypt diverged sharply from that of the previous Greco-Roman period and was transformed under the impact of Western occupation. The subsequent history of Egypt is therefore largely a study of the processes by which Egyptian Islamic civilization evolved, particularly the processes of Arabization and Islamization. But to confine Egyptian history to internal developments is to distort it, for during that entire period Egypt was a part of a great world empire; and within this broader context, Egypt’s history is a record of its long struggle to dominate an empire—a struggle that is not without its parallels, of course, in both ancient and modern times.

The Ṭūlūnid dynasty (868–905)

Aḥmad’s first step upon his arrival in Egypt was to eliminate possible rivals. From an early date the administration of Egypt had been divided between the amīr (military governor), appointed by the caliph, and the ʿāmil (fiscal officer), who was sometimes appointed by the caliph, sometimes by the governor. When Aḥmad entered Egypt in 868 he found the office of ʿāmil filled by one Ibn al-Mudabbir, who over a period of years had gained control of Egyptian finances, enriching himself in the process, and was therefore reluctant to acknowledge Aḥmad’s authority. A struggle for power soon broke out between the two, which ended four years later with the transfer of Ibn al-Mudabbir to Syria and the assumption of his duties and powers by Aḥmad. An even more important step for Aḥmad was the acquisition of an army that would be independent of the caliphate and loyal to him. To build such an army, Aḥmad resorted to the same method the caliphs themselves used—the purchase of Mamluks who could be trained as military units loyal to their owner.

In 877, when Aḥmad failed to pay Egypt’s full contribution to the Abbasid campaign during the Zanj rebellion in Iraq, the caliphal government, dominated by the caliph’s brother al-Muwaffaq, realized that Egypt was slipping from imperial control. An expedition dispatched by al-Muwaffaq to remove Aḥmad from the governorship failed. Taking advantage of the caliphate’s preoccupation with the revolt, Aḥmad in 878 invaded Palestine and Syria, where he occupied the principal cities and garrisoned them with his troops. Thereafter he signified his autonomy by imprinting his name on the coinage along with that of the caliph. Although the regent al-Muwaffaq lacked the resources to engage Aḥmad in battle, he did have him publicly cursed in the mosques of the empire as a means of retaliation.

Internally, Aḥmad took active measures to raise Egyptian agricultural productivity and thereby to increase tax revenues; the huge surplus he left in the state treasury at his death in 884 is a measure of his success. Another tangible indication of his achievement for Egypt is the enormous mosque, the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun, which he erected in a suburb of Al-Fusṭāṭ that is now Cairo; in contrast, no building comparable in grandeur had even been contemplated by the governors who preceded him.

The great benefits Aḥmad had gained for Egypt by keeping its resources within the country were squandered by his son and successor, Khumārawayh. He expended huge sums on luxurious appointments for his residence and paid a fortune as a dowry for a daughter he married to the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid (reigned 892–902) in 895. Nevertheless, Khumārawayh was able to maintain the Egyptian armies in the field, and he led them to victory both in Syria and in Mesopotamia. He resolved his father’s conflict with the caliphate by a combination of arms and diplomacy, so that Khumārawayh’s authority over Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia was given official caliphal recognition. This apparent strength evaporated when Khumārawayh was murdered in 896, leaving no funds with which his 14-year-old heir could pay the troops. The entire country fell into anarchy, which lasted until 905 when a caliphal army invaded Egypt and momentarily restored it to the status of a province ruled by governors sent from Baghdad.

The Ikhshīdid dynasty (935–969)

For 30 years the governors were unable to restore stability in Egypt. During this time, Egypt was subjected to attacks from the Shiʿi Fāṭimid dynasty based in North Africa and to the rampages of an unruly domestic army. The appointment of Muḥammad ibn Ṭughj, from Sogdiana in Central Asia, as governor in 935 led to a repetition of Aḥmad’s achievement; by bold measures Muḥammad established his authority over the treasury and the army, reasserted Egyptian influence in Syria, thwarted the Fāṭimids, and won the governorship of the holy cities of Arabia (Mecca and Medina). In addition, he founded a dynasty; his sons inherited his Sogdian princely title of ikhshīd, but their authority was usurped by their Abyssinian (Ethiopian) slave tutor, Abū al-Misk Kāfūr, who eventually ruled Egypt with the caliph’s sanction. When Kāfūr died in 968 the Ikhshīdids were unable to maintain order in the army and the bureaucracy. In the following year the Fāṭimids took advantage of the disorder in Egypt to launch yet another attack, this one so successful that it led to the occupation of the country by a Berber army led by the Fāṭimid general Jawhar.

The Fāṭimid dynasty (969–1171)

The establishment of the Fāṭimid caliphate in 973 in the newly built palace city of Cairo had dramatic consequences for the evolution of Islamic Egypt. Politically, the Fāṭimids went a step further than the Ṭūlūnids by setting up Egypt as an independent rival to the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, an avowed aim of the early Fāṭimid propagandists (Arabic: duʿāh, singular dāʿī) was to achieve world dominion, eradicating the Abbasid caliphate in the process. For a variety of reasons they achieved neither of these goals; nevertheless, at the height of Fāṭimid power at the beginning of the 11th century, the Fāṭimid caliph could claim sovereignty over the whole of coastal North Africa, Sicily, the Hejaz and Yemen in Arabia, and southern Syria and Palestine. Although actual political-military control was never firm except in Egypt, allegiance paid to the Fāṭimids by their provinces was just as meaningful as that paid to the Abbasids and for a time was certainly more widespread. Even when the Fāṭimid state fell into decline later in the 11th century and abandoned its imperial vision, Egypt continued to play an independent role in the Islamic world under the leadership of Armenian generals who had gained control of the Fāṭimid armies.

The Mamluk and Ottoman periods (1250–1800)

The Ottomans (1517–1798)

With the Ottomans’ defeat of the Mamluks in 1516–17, Egyptian medieval history had come full circle, as Egypt reverted to the status of a province governed from Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Again the country was exploited as a source of taxation for the benefit of an imperial government and as a base for foreign expansion. The economic decline that had begun under the late Mamluks continued, and with it came a decline in Egyptian culture.

Some historians attribute the lethargy of Egypt in this era solely to the rule of Constantinople. But, although Ottoman policy was geared to imperial, not Egyptian, needs, it was obviously to the rulers’ benefit to provide a stable government that would maintain Egyptian agriculture at a high level of productivity and would promote the transit trade. To a certain extent Ottoman actions served these purposes. The decisive factor that ultimately undermined Ottoman policies was the perpetuation of the former Mamluk elite; though they collaborated with the Ottoman government, they often defied it and ultimately came to dominate it. By and large, the history of Ottoman Egypt concerns the process by which the conquered Mamluks reasserted their power within the Egyptian state.

The Ottoman conquest

From the conquest itself, the Ottoman presence in Egypt was entangled with Mamluk factionalism. There is no doubt that the Ottomans invaded Syria in 1516 to thwart an incipient coalition against Ottoman expansion between the Ṣafavid dynasty of Persia and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. The long-standing enmity between the Ottomans and the Mamluks arose from their contest to control the Turkoman frontier states north of Syria. After the Ottomans strengthened their hold over eastern Anatolia in 1514, it was only natural that the Mamluks should attempt to bolster their forces in northern Syria and exchange diplomatic missions with the Ṣafavids. The Ottoman sultan Selim I (the Grim) responded by attacking the reinforced Mamluk army in Syria, probably as a preliminary step in a new campaign against the Ṣafavids. In 1516, after Selim had defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dābiq (north of Aleppo), Ottoman goals had probably been met, especially since the Mamluk sultan Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī died in the battle. But the Mamluks rallied around a new sultan in Cairo who refused to accept Selim’s terms for a settlement. Spurred on by the Mamluk traitor Khayr Bey, Selim marched against Egypt in 1517, defeated the Mamluks, and installed Khayr Bey as Ottoman governor. Khayr Bey died in 1522; thereafter, the Ottoman viceroy (called vali), with the title of pasha, was sent from Constantinople.

From the French to the British occupation (1798–1882)

The French occupation and its consequences (1798–1805)

Although several projects for a French occupation of Egypt had been advanced in the 17th and 18th centuries, the purpose of the expedition that sailed under Napoleon I from Toulon in May 1798 was specifically connected with the war against Britain. Napoleon had discounted the feasibility of an invasion of England but hoped, by occupying Egypt, to damage British trade, threaten India, and obtain assets for bargaining in any future peace settlement. Meanwhile, as a colony under the benevolent and progressive administration of Revolutionary France, Egypt was to be regenerated and would regain its ancient prosperity. The military and naval forces were therefore accompanied by a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate and report the past and present condition of the country.

Eluding the British Mediterranean fleet under Horatio Nelson, the French landed at Abū Qīr (Aboukir) Bay on July 1 and took Alexandria the next day. In an Arabic proclamation, Napoleon assured the Egyptians that he came as a friend to Islam and the Ottoman sultan, to punish the usurping Mamluks and to liberate the people. From Alexandria the French advanced on Cairo, defeating Murād Bey at Shubrākhīt (July 13), and again decisively at Imbābah, opposite Cairo in the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21. Murād fled to Upper Egypt, while his colleague, Ibrāhīm Bey, together with the Ottoman viceroy, made his way to Syria.

After entering Cairo (July 25), Napoleon sought to conciliate the population, especially the religious leaders (ʿulamāʾ), by demonstrating his sympathy with Islam and by establishing councils (divans) as a means of consulting Egyptian opinion. The destruction of the French fleet at Abū Qīr by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile on August 1 virtually cut Napoleon’s communications and made it necessary for him to consolidate his rule and to make the expeditionary force as self-sufficient as possible. The savants, organized in the Institut d’Égypte, played their part in this. Meanwhile, Egyptian resentment of alien rule, administrative innovations, and the growing fiscal burden of military occupation was exacerbated when the Ottoman sultan, Selim III (1789–1807), declared war on France on September 11. An unforeseen revolt in Cairo on October 21 was suppressed after an artillery bombardment that ended any hopes of cordial Franco-Egyptian coexistence.

Ottoman Syria, dominated by Aḥmad al-Jazzār, the governor of Acre (now ʿAkko, Israel), was the base from which French-occupied Egypt might most easily be threatened, and Napoleon resolved to deny it to his enemies. His invasion force crossed the frontier in February 1799 but failed to take Acre after a protracted siege (March 19–May 20), and Napoleon evacuated Syrian territory. A seaborne Ottoman invading force landed at Abū Qīr in July but failed to maintain its bridgehead. At this point Napoleon resolved to return to France, and he succeeded in slipping away, past the British fleet, on August 22.

His successor as general in chief, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, viewed the situation of the expeditionary force with pessimism and, like many of the soldiers, wished to return to the theatre of war in Europe. He therefore entered into negotiations with the Ottomans and by the Convention of Al-ʿArīsh (January 24, 1800) agreed to evacuate Egypt. Sir Sydney Smith, the British naval commander in the eastern Mediterranean, sponsored the convention, but in this he had exceeded his powers and was instructed by his superior officer, Admiral Lord Keith, to require the French to surrender as prisoners of war. Although the Ottoman reoccupation was well under way, Kléber and the French determined on resistance and defeated the Turkish forces at the Battle of Heliopolis (March 20). A second revolt of Cairo, fomented by Ottoman fugitives, took about a month to suppress; but French authority had been restored when Kléber was assassinated by a Syrian Muslim, Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī, on June 14.

 

His successor, ʿAbd Allāh Jacques Menou, a French officer (and former nobleman) who had turned Muslim, was determined to maintain the occupation and administered at first a tolerably settled country, although he lacked the prestige of his two predecessors. In 1801 a threefold invasion of Egypt began. British troops were landed at Abū Qīr in March, while the Ottomans advanced from Syria. Shortly afterward, British Indian forces were landed at Quṣayr on the Red Sea coast. The French garrison in Cairo capitulated in June and Menou himself at Alexandria in September.

The brief episode of the French occupation was to be significant for Egypt in several ways. The arrival of a European army accompanied by scholars and scientists appropriately inaugurated the impact of the West, which was to be felt increasingly afterward. Egypt, insulated for centuries by the Mamluk and Ottoman sultanates, was no longer immune from European influence; it had become an object of the contending policies of France and Britain, a part of the Eastern Question. Napoleon’s savants had little success in interpreting Western culture to the traditionalist ʿulamāʾ of Cairo; their achievement was rather to unveil Egypt to Europe. They uncovered the celebrated Rosetta Stone, which held a trilingual inscription making it possible to decipher hieroglyphs and which thus laid the foundation of modern Egyptology. Their reports and monographs were collected in the monumental Description de l’Égypte (“Description of Egypt”), which was published in parts from 1809 to 1828 in Paris.

Of more immediate consequence for Egypt was the effect of the French occupation on internal politics. The Mamluk ascendancy was fatally weakened. Murād Bey, who had made his peace with the French, died shortly before their capitulation in 1801, and Ibrāhīm Bey, who returned to Egypt with the Ottomans, had henceforward little power. The new Mamluk leaders, ʿUthmān Bey al-Bardīsī (died 1806) and Muḥammad Bey al-Alfī (died 1807), former retainers of Murād, headed rival factions and had in any case to reckon with the British and Ottoman occupation forces. In March 1803 the British troops were evacuated in accordance with the Treaty of Amiens (March 27, 1802). But the Ottomans, determined to reassert their control over Egypt, remained, establishing their power through a viceroy and an occupying army, in which the most effective fighting force was an Albanian contingent. The Albanians, however, acted as an independent party and in May 1803 mutinied and installed their leader as acting viceroy. When he was assassinated shortly afterward, the command of the Albanians passed to his lieutenant, Muḥammad ʿAlī (reigned 1805–49), who, during the ensuing two years, cautiously strengthened his own position at the expense of both the Mamluks and the Ottomans.

Muḥammad ʿAlī and his successors (1805–82)

In May 1805 a revolt broke out in Cairo against the Ottoman viceroy, Khūrshīd Pasha. The ʿulamāʾ invested Muḥammad ʿAlī as viceroy. For some weeks there was street fighting, and Khūrshīd was besieged in the citadel. In July Sultan Selim III confirmed Muḥammad ʿAlī in office and the revolt ended.

Muḥammad ʿAlī’s viceroyalty was marked by a series of military successes, some of which were attended by political failures that frustrated his wider aims. After the renewal of war between Britain and Napoleonic France in 1803, Egypt again became an area of strategic significance. A British expedition occupied Alexandria in 1807 but failed to capture Rosetta and, after a defeat at the hands of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s forces, was allowed to withdraw.

Military expansion

In Arabia the domination of Islam’s holy cities, Mecca and Medina, by puritanical Wahhābī Muslims was a serious embarrassment to the Ottoman sultan, who was the titular overlord of the Arabian territory of the Hejaz and the leading Muslim sovereign. At the invitation of Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808–39), Muḥammad ʿAlī sent an expedition to Arabia that between 1811 and 1813 expelled the Wahhābīs from the Hejaz. In a further campaign (1816–18), Ibrāhīm Pasha, the viceroy’s eldest son, defeated the Wahhābīs in their homeland of Najd and brought central Arabia within Egyptian control. In 1820–21 Muḥammad ʿAlī sent an expedition up the Nile River and conquered much of what is now the northern portion of the Sudan. By so doing, he made himself master of one of the principal channels of the slave trade and began an African empire that was to be expanded under his successors.

After the outbreak of the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule, Muḥammad ʿAlī, at Mahmud’s request, suppressed the Cretan revolt in 1822. In 1825 Ibrāhīm began a victorious campaign in the Morea in southern Greece, where his military success provoked intervention by the European powers and brought on the destruction of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets at the Battle of Navarino (October 20, 1827). The Morea was evacuated the following year.

In 1831 Muḥammad ʿAlī embarked upon the invasion of Syria. His pretext was a quarrel with the governor of Acre, but deeper considerations were involved, particularly the growing strength of the sultan, which might threaten his own autonomy. Syria, moreover, was strategically important, and its products, especially timber, usefully complemented the Egyptian economy. The viceroy’s forces defeated the Ottomans at Kütahya near Konya in Anatolia (December 1832), and in 1833 the sultan ceded his Syrian provinces to Muḥammad ʿAlī.

 

In 1839 Ottoman forces reentered Syria but were defeated by Ibrāhīm at the Battle of Nizip (June 24). A fortnight later Mahmud II died, and the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of dissolution; it was saved only by European intervention. In 1840 the European powers compelled Ibrāhīm to evacuate Syria. Muḥammad ʿAlī’s Arabian empire (which since 1833 had extended into Yemen) crumbled at the same time. Although in 1841 the new sultan, Abdülmecid I (reigned 1839–61), conferred on the family of Muḥammad ʿAlī the hereditary rule of Egypt, the viceroy’s powers were declining. Because of the viceroy’s growing senility, Ibrāhīm took power in July 1848. But the son’s reign lasted only a few months until his death the following November. The next viceroy was ʿAbbās I (reigned 1848–54), the eldest grandson of Muḥammad ʿAlī (who died in 1849).

ʿAbbās I and Saʿīd, 1848-63

The reign of ʿAbbās I (1848–54) indicates how precarious was the advance of Westernization in Egypt. The effort had already been relaxed in the last decade of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s rule, and ʿAbbās showed himself to be a traditionalist. It was typical of his policy that he closed the school of languages and the translation bureau and sent their director, al-Ṭahṭāwī, to virtual exile in the Sudan. The French, who had played so large a part in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s reforms, fell into disfavour, and for diplomatic support ʿAbbās turned to their British rivals, whose help was needed against the Ottomans. Although initially ʿAbbās was ostentatiously loyal to the sultan, he resented an attempt made at that time to curtail his autonomy. The British, for their part, managed to enhance their communications with India by winning from ʿAbbās a concession to build a railway from Alexandria to Cairo; the line was completed between 1851 and 1856 and was extended to Suez two years later. Saʿīd (reigned 1854–63), who succeeded on ʿAbbās’s mysterious and violent death, inaugurated another reversal of policy. While he lacked Muḥammad ʿAlī’s energy and ability, he was not unsympathetic to the Westernizers. To his French friend Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had been a friend to Muḥammad ʿAlī as well) he granted in 1854 a concession for the cutting of a canal across the isthmus of Suez. This embroiled him both with the sultan, whose prerogative had been encroached upon, and the British, whose overland railway route was threatened by the project; a deadlock lasted throughout his reign.

Ismāʿīl, 1863–79

Ismāʿīl, the son of Ibrāhīm Pasha, who succeeded on the death of Saʿīd, displayed some of his grandfather’s dynamic energy and enthusiasm for modernization. He lacked caution, however, and his reign ended in catastrophe. From his predecessors he inherited a precarious economy and a burden of debt. The decline in North American cotton exports caused by the American Civil War (1861–65) greatly increased Britain’s demand for Egyptian long-staple cotton. This product had been introduced and developed in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s time, but its production had languished until the interruption of supplies of American cotton caused a fourfold increase in price during the war years. When peace returned, prices collapsed with disastrous consequences for the Egyptian economy. In the management of his finances, Ismāʿīl was both extravagant and unwise and laid himself open to unscrupulous exploitation. Ismāʿīl was committed to the Suez Canal project, but he modified the grant in two important respects: by withdrawing the cession of a strip of land from the Nile River to the Suez isthmus, along which a freshwater canal was to be constructed, and by refusing to provide unlimited (and largely unpaid) peasant labour for the project, a practice that had stirred great outcry in England and continental Europe. The matter was submitted to arbitration; a large indemnity was imposed on Ismāʿīl, who also agreed to pay for a large block of shares put by de Lesseps into Saʿīd’s account. French pressure on the sultan succeeded at last in overcoming resistance to the canal project at Constantinople, and a firman (decree from the sultan) authorizing its construction was granted in March 1866. Work had in fact already been going on for seven years, and in November 1869 the Suez Canal was opened to shipping by the empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III of France. The incident symbolized the political and cultural orientation of Egypt in the middle decades of the 19th century.

Ismāʿīl, in other ways, presented himself as the ruler of a new and important state. Although his relations with his suzerain, Sultan Abdülaziz (reigned 1861–76), were normally friendly, he was no less eager than his predecessors to secure the autonomy of his dynasty. In 1866 he obtained a firman establishing the succession by primogeniture in his own line—abandoning the contemporary Ottoman rule of succession by the eldest male. A year later a firman conferred upon Ismāʿīl the special title of khedive, which had in fact been used unofficially since Muḥammad ʿAlī’s time and which distinguished the viceroy of Egypt from other Ottoman governors. A period of strained relations developed between the khedive and the sultan arising from Ismāʿīl’s implied pretensions to sovereignty at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but the two were later reconciled; a firman reconfirmed the khedive’s privileges in 1873. These concessions by the sultan, however, cost Ismāʿīl heavy expenditure—in bribes to Ottoman officials in Constantinople—and an increase in the annual Egyptian tribute and were another factor in the growth of Ismāʿīl’s indebtedness.

Ismāʿīl had inherited an African empire in the northern area of the Sudan. Since the middle of the century, in consequence of the abolition of the monopolies, merchants had penetrated south and southwest, up the White Nile and the Al-Ghazāl rivers, in search of ivory. An ancillary slave trade that had developed distressed Europeans, who forgot that their depredations against Africans had continued virtually unabated until the early 19th century, and they prevailed on the khedive to abolish this commerce. Thus, acting on humanitarian and expansionist motives, Ismāʿīl sought to extend Egyptian rule into these remoter regions. He made considerable use of expatriates, notably the Englishmen Sir Samuel White Baker and Sir Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon, who extended the khedive’s nominal authority to the African Great Lakes. Another series of events led to the conquest in 1874 of the sultanate of Darfur in the west. The khedive also wished to make Egypt the dominant power in the Red Sea region. The sultan granted him the old Ottoman ports of Sawākin and Mitsiwa in 1865. Egyptian control was established on the Somali coast, and in 1875 the city of Hārer was captured. Attempts to invade Abyssinia in 1875 and 1876 were, however, unsuccessful and marked the limits of Ismāʿīl’s imperial expansion.

Like other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was bound by the capitulations—a system of privileges derived from earlier Western treaties with former sultans. Under the capitulations, European and American residents in Egypt were exempt from local taxation and were subject only to their own consular courts. By patient negotiations over several years, Nūbār Pasha, Ismāʿīl’s Armenian minister, succeeded in establishing the Mixed Courts in 1875. These had jurisdiction in civil cases involving Egyptians and foreigners, or foreigners of different nationalities, and had both foreign and Egyptian judges, who administered codes based on French law.

By that time the social consequences of the agrarian and political changes inaugurated by Muḥammad ʿAlī were clearly appearing. The khedive and his family were Egypt’s principal landholders, possessing extensive personal estates quite apart from the state lands. Around the khedivial family was a parvenu aristocracy that held the principal civil and military offices. Many of its members were also great landowners; most of them were Turkish or Circassian by origin. Although the peasantry’s condition had been harmed by military conscription, by corvées for public works (including large-scale demands for labour on the railways and the Suez Canal), and by ill-considered economic and industrial experiments, the rights of cultivators on their land gradually increased. The richer peasants, from whom the village headmen were recruited, in particular increased in importance. When, in November 1866, Ismāʿīl set up the consultative council known as the Assembly of Delegates, the members of which were chosen by indirect election, the great majority of those elected were village headmen. While Ismāʿīl did not intend to give any of his powers to the Assembly, its establishment and composition pointed to the political growth that would occur among native Egyptians in the next 60 years. Conscription had affected the makeup of the army. The power of the entrenched Turco-Circassians was challenged by native Egyptian officers, who resented the privileges of their foreign colleagues. The defeat of the Circassian commander in chief, Rātib Pasha, by the Abyssinians in 1876 was a blow from which the prestige of the old officer group never recovered.

From the Assembly, the army, and the Westernized intelligentsia emerged politically conscious individuals and groups who drew their ideas from both Western and Islamic sources. Their organization was for the most part small-scale and ephemeral, and their outlook was subversive, being hostile to the autocracy of the khedive, the dominance of the Turco-Circassians, and the pervasive power of the Europeans.

Political tension increased in the last years of Ismāʿīl’s reign. Various expedients to postpone bankruptcy (e.g., the khedive’s sale in 1875 of his Suez Canal shares to Britain) had failed, and in 1876 the Caisse de la Dette Publique (Commission of the Public Debt) was established for the service of the Egyptian debt. Its members were nominated by France, Britain, Austria, and Italy. In the same year, Egyptian revenue and expenditure were placed under the supervision of a British and a French controller (the Dual Control). After an international enquiry in 1878, Ismāʿīl accepted the principle of ministerial responsibility for government and authorized the formation of an international ministry under Nūbār that included the British and French controllers in his cabinet. Ismāʿīl, however, was not willing to give up his autocracy. In 1879 he exploited an army demonstration against the European ministers to dismiss Nūbār, and he worked in alliance with the Assembly of Delegates to destroy international control over Egypt. By this time, however, his standing outside Egypt had been lost; and in June 1879, Sultan Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876–1909), instigated by France and Britain, deposed him in favour of his son, Muḥammad Tawfīq.

The period of British domination (1882–1952)

ʿAbbās Ḥilmī II, 1892–1914

The death of Tawfīq and the accession of his 17-year-old son, ʿAbbās II (Ḥilmī), in 1892 opened a new phase of opposition to the occupation. The new khedive would not submit to Cromer’s tutelage, while the British agent resented the attempts of one so much his junior to play a serious role in Egyptian politics. ʿAbbās dismissed Muṣṭafā Fahmī in January 1893 and tried to appoint his own nominee as prime minister. Cromer, backed by the British government, frustrated these endeavours, and Fahmī eventually returned to office. ʿAbbās provoked another crisis in January 1894 by publicly criticizing British military officers, especially Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the sirdar (commander in chief). Once again Cromer stepped in and forced ʿAbbās to make a public apology.

Other considerations apart, the behaviour of ʿAbbās in the early years of his reign indicated the emergence of a new generation who had only been children when the occupation began. One of ʿAbbās’s contemporaries was Muṣṭafā Kāmil (1874–1908), who had studied in France and come to know a group of writers and politicians opposed to the British occupation. On returning to Egypt in 1894, he had reached an understanding with the khedive on the basis of their common opposition to the British occupation. By his speeches and writings (in 1900 he founded his own newspaper, Al-Liwā), he endeavoured to create an Egyptian patriotism that would rally the entire nation around the khedive. A boost was given to nationalism by the campaigns for the reconquest of the Sudan (1896–98)—to which Egypt provided most of the money and troops, although the commanding officers were British—and by the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreements, which nominally gave Egypt and Britain joint responsibility for the administration of the reconquered territory but in effect made the Sudan a British possession.

A final episode in the reconquest of the Sudan, the confrontation of British and French at Fashoda on the White Nile in 1898 (the Fashoda Incident), was followed by the reconciliation of the two powers in the Entente Cordiale (1904), which, inter alia, gave Britain a free hand in Egypt. This deflated the hopes of Muṣṭafā Kāmil and his alliance with the khedive, who became more willing to cooperate with Cromer. Muṣṭafā Kāmil now turned to Sultan Abdülhamid. When a dispute (the Tābah Incident, 1906) arose between the Ottomans and the occupying power over the Sinai Peninsula, Muṣṭafā Kāmil sought to rally Egyptian nationalist opinion in favour of the sultan, but some Egyptians accused him of harming their national interest in order to favour Islamic unity.

British domination in Egypt and Cromer’s personal ascendancy never seemed more secure than in the period following the Entente Cordiale. But the “veiled protectorate” had hidden weaknesses. Cromer was both out of touch and out of sympathy with the new generation of Egyptians. The occupation had become to all intents and purposes permanent, and the consequent growth of the British official establishment frustrated educated Egyptians, who sought government posts for themselves and their sons. The British, however, saw themselves as the benefactors of the Egyptian peasantry, whom they had delivered from the corvée and the lash. The Dinshawāy Incident showed them in another light. In June 1906 a fracas between villagers at Dinshawāy and a party of British officers out pigeon shooting resulted in the death of a British officer. The special tribunal set up to try the matter imposed exemplary and brutal sentences on the villagers. In the bitter aftermath of this affair, which strengthened Muṣṭafā Kāmil’s nationalists, Cromer retired in May 1907.

Sir Eldon Gorst, who succeeded Cromer, had served in Egypt from 1886 to 1904 and brought a fresh mind to bear on the problems of the occupation. He reached an understanding with the khedive and sought to diminish the growing power and numbers of the British establishment. At the same time, he tried to give more effective authority to Egyptian political institutions. Muṣṭafā Fahmī’s long premiership ended, and he was followed by a Copt, Buṭrus Ghālī. When Gorst died prematurely in July 1911, he had attained only limited success. Many British officials resented his policies, which at the same time failed to conciliate the nationalists. Muṣṭafa Kāmil had died in 1908 and had been succeeded by Muḥammad Farīd, who led the National Party toward greater extremism in its opposition to the British. A project to extend the Suez Canal Company’s 99-year concession by 40 years was thrown out by the General Assembly (a quasi-parliamentary body, set up in 1883), while Buṭrus Ghālī, who had advocated it, was assassinated a few days later by a nationalist. The appointment of Lord Kitchener to succeed Gorst portended the end of conciliation of the khedive. But Kitchener, although autocratic, was not wholly conservative; his attempts to limit the power and influence of ʿAbbās served the interests of the moderate Egyptians who did not belong to the National Party. The Organic Law of 1913 created a new and more powerful Legislative Assembly that served as a training ground for the nationalist leaders of the postwar period. At the same time, the peasants were helped by improved irrigation and by legal protection of their landholdings from seizure for debt.

The Kingdom of Egypt (1922–52)

The new kingdom was in form a constitutional monarchy. The constitution, based on that of Belgium and promulgated in April 1923, defined the king’s executive powers and established a bicameral legislature. An electoral law provided for universal male suffrage and the indirect election of deputies to the Assembly; the Senate was half elected and half appointed. But Egyptian constitutionalism proved as illusory as Egyptian independence. A political struggle was continually waged among three opportunist contestants—the king, the Wafd, and the British.

The interwar period

Never popular, Fuʾād felt insecure and was therefore prepared to intrigue with the nationalists or with the British to secure his position and powers. The Wafd, with its mass following, elaborate organization, and (until his death in 1927) charismatic leader Zaghloul, was Egypt’s only truly national party. Ideologically, it stood for national independence against British domination and for constitutional government against royal autocracy. In practice—and increasingly as time went on—its leaders were prepared to make deals with the British or the king to obtain or retain power. Personal and political rivalries led to the formation of splinter parties, the first of which, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, broke off as early as 1922. The primary aim of the British government, represented by its high commissioner (after 1936, its ambassador), was to secure imperial interests, especially the control of communications through the Suez Canal. The need for a treaty to safeguard these interests led Britain on more than one occasion to conciliate nationalist feeling by supporting the Wafd against the king.

The first general election, in January 1924, gave the Wafd a majority, and Zaghloul became prime minister for a few months marked by unsuccessful treaty discussions with the British and tension with the king. When in November 1924 Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar and governor-general of the Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo, Allenby immediately presented an ultimatum that, though later modified by the British government, caused Zaghloul to resign. The general election of March 1925 left the Wafd still the strongest party, but the parliament no sooner met than it was dissolved. For more than a year Egypt was governed by decree. The third general election, in May 1926, again gave the Wafd a majority. The British opposed a return of Zaghloul to the premiership, and the office went instead to the Liberal Constitutionalist ʿAdlī Yakan, while Zaghloul held the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies until his death in 1927. Once again, tension developed between the parliament and the king, and in April 1927 ʿAdlī resigned, to be succeeded by another Liberal Constitutionalist, ʿAbd al-Khāliq Tharwat (Sarwat) Pasha, who negotiated a draft treaty with the British foreign secretary. The draft treaty, however, failed to win the approval of the Wafd. Tharwat resigned in March 1928, and Muṣṭafā al-Naḥḥās Pasha, Zaghloul’s successor as head of the Wafd, became prime minister. But the king dismissed him in June and dissolved the parliament in July. In effect, the constitution was suspended, and Egypt was again governed by decree under a Liberal Constitutionalist premier, Muḥammad Maḥmūd Pasha.

Draft treaty proposals were agreed upon in June 1929, but because Maḥmūd could not overcome Wafdist opposition, Britain pressed for a return to constitutional government, hoping that a freely elected parliament would approve the proposals. In the fourth general election (December 1929), the Wafd won a majority, and al-Naḥḥās again became premier. Treaty negotiations resumed but broke down over the issue of the Sudan, from which the Egyptians had been virtually excluded since 1924. Al-Naḥḥās also clashed with the king, whose influence he sought to curtail. He resigned in June 1930, and Fuʾād appointed Ismāʿīl Ṣidqī Pasha to the premiership. The constitution of 1923 was abrogated, replaced by another promulgated by royal decree. This, with its accompanying electoral law, strengthened the king’s power. By this and other measures, Ṣidqī sought to break the power of the Wafd, which boycotted the general election of June 1931. The strong government of Ṣidqī lasted until September 1933, when the king dismissed him. For the next two years palace-appointed governments ruled Egypt.

But Fuʾād, whose health was failing, could not hold out indefinitely against the internal pressure of the Wafd and the external pressure of Britain, which increasingly wanted a treaty with Egypt negotiated specifically through the Wafd. In 1935 the constitution of 1923 was restored, and a general election in May 1936 gave the Wafd a majority once more. Fuʾād had died in the previous month and was succeeded by his son Farouk I (reigned 1936–52), who was still a minor when he ascended the throne. Al-Naḥḥās became prime minister for the third time. Agreement was quickly reached with Britain, and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, a document calling for mutual defense and alliance between the two countries, was signed in August 1936. At the conference in Montreux, Switzerland, held in the following year, Egypt, backed by Britain, obtained the immediate abolition of the capitulations and the extinction of the Mixed Courts after 12 years. Also in 1937, Egypt became a member of the League of Nations.

Al-Naḥḥās had reached the height of his power, but only briefly. In July 1937 the young king Farouk came of age and assumed his full royal powers. Popular, with ambitions to rule, Farouk soon turned against his prime minister. A split developed in the Wafd: Maḥmūd Fahmī al-Nuqrāshī Pasha and Aḥmad Māhir Pasha were expelled and formed the Saadist Party. The Wafdist youth movement, known as the Blueshirts, fought with the Greenshirts of Young Egypt, an ultranationalist organization. In December 1937 King Farouk dismissed al-Naḥḥās. In the ensuing general election (April 1938), the Wafd won only 12 seats.

The revolution and the Republic

The Nasser regime

At mid-century Egypt was ripe for revolution. Political groupings of both right and left pressed for radical alternatives. From an array of contenders for power, it was a movement of military conspirators—the Free Officers led by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser—that toppled the monarchy in a coup on July 23, 1952. In broad outline, the history of contemporary Egypt is the story of this coup, which preempted a revolution but then turned into a revolution from above. For more than five decades, rule by Free Officers brought just enough progress at home and enhancement of standing abroad to make Egypt an island of stability in a turbulent Middle East.

The 1952 coup was fueled by a powerful but vague Egyptian nationalism rather than by a coherent ideology. It produced a regime whose initially reformist character was given more precise form by a domestic power struggle and by the necessity of coming to terms with the British, who still occupied their Suez Canal base.

The domestic challenge to Nasser came in February–April 1954 from Maj. Gen. Muhammad Naguib, an older officer who served as figurehead for the Free Officers and had been president since June 1953, when Egypt officially became a republic. Political parties had been abolished in January of that year. To supplement his power base in the military forces, Nasser drew on the police and on working-class support mobilized by some of the trade unions. The small middle class, the former political parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood all rallied to Naguib. In the end, Naguib was placed under house arrest, and Nasser assumed the premiership. Nasser’s triumph meant that the government would thereafter rely on its military and security apparatus coupled with carefully controlled manipulation of the civilian population.

Obscured in the West was Nasser’s initial moderation regarding Egypt’s key foreign policy challenges—the Sudan, the British presence, and Israel. An agreement signed in February 1953 established a transitional period of self-government for the Sudan, which became an independent republic in January 1956. Prolonged negotiations led to the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement, under which British troops were to be evacuated gradually from the canal zone. Some Egyptians criticized the treaty from a nationalist perspective, fearing that external events could permit the British to reoccupy the canal bases.

An attempt to assassinate Nasser by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in October 1954 was used as a pretext to crush that organization. A number of its members were executed and hundreds were imprisoned under brutal conditions. In the decades to come, these incarcerations were to bear bitter fruit as a generation of Brotherhood militants became hardened and drew new conclusions about the nature of the state in Egypt. One of them, a formerly secularist writer and scholar named Sayyid Quṭb who had come late to the Brotherhood, drew upon his prison experience to draft a template for modern Islamic holy war that was afterward embraced by a large number of Egypt’s Muslim militants.

 

In retrospect, it is clear that Nasser was a reluctant champion of the Arab struggle against Israel. Domestic development was his priority. A dangerous pattern of violent interactions, however, eventually drew the Egyptians into renewed conflict with Israel. Small groups of Palestinian raiders (fedayeen), including some operating from Egyptian-controlled Gaza, were infiltrating Israel’s borders. Early in 1955 the Israeli government began its policy of large-scale retaliation. One such strike—an attack on Gaza in February 1955 that killed 38 Egyptians—exposed the military weakness of the Free Officer regime, which tried, but failed, to buy weapons from Western countries.

In September 1955 Nasser announced that an arms agreement had been signed between Egypt and Czechoslovakia (acting for the Soviet Union). The way to improved Soviet-Egyptian relations had been prepared by Nasser’s refusal to join the Baghdad Pact (the Middle East Treaty Organization, later known as the Central Treaty Organization), which had been formed earlier that year by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, with the support of the United States, to counter the threat of Soviet expansion in the Middle East. With the 1955 arms deal, the Soviet Union established itself as a force in the region.

The erosion of Nasser’s initially pro-Western orientation hastened when the United States and Britain refused to give Egypt funds they had previously promised for the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Defiantly, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July 1956 in order to use its proceeds to finance the dam. Britain and France, major shareholders in the company, were angered by Nasser’s actions (France was equally infuriated by Egyptian aid to the Algerians who were revolting against French rule) and sought to regain control of the canal by an intricate ruse. In collaboration with France and Britain, Israel, which continued to suffer raids by Egyptian-supported guerrillas, attacked Egypt in October. The two European powers then brought in their own troops, claiming to be enforcing a UN peace resolution, and reoccupied the canal zone. Pressure on the invading powers by the United States and the Soviet Union, however, soon ended the so-called Suez Crisis, leaving Nasser, despite his military losses, in control of the canal. The following year, Egypt agreed to the placement of a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) in the Sinai Peninsula to act as a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces.

Nasser, who, as the sole candidate, had been elected president in June 1956, pursued a more radical line in the ensuing decade. He created the National Union as an instrument of mobilizing the people and launched an ambitious program of domestic transformation, a revolution from above that was paralleled by a drive for Egyptian leadership in the Arab world. Early in 1958 Egypt combined with Syria to form the United Arab Republic (U.A.R.), but Egyptian dominance antagonized many Syrians, and the union was dissolved in bitterness in September 1961 (Egypt retained the name United Arab Republic until 1971). Nasser blamed the secession on Syrian reactionaries, and in direct response he pushed his revolution in Egypt further to the left. The following spring a National Charter proclaimed Egypt’s regime to be one of scientific socialism, with a new mass organization, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), replacing the National Union. Most large manufacturing firms, banks, transport services, and insurance companies were nationalized or sequestered.

Egypt made dramatic domestic gains. In 1950 manufacturing contributed 10 percent to the total national output, but by 1970 that figure had doubled. However, these achievements in industry were not matched in agriculture, and they were further undercut by Egypt’s rapid population growth. In a landmark move toward agricultural reform, Nasser enacted a policy in 1952 that limited land ownership to 200 feddans (208 acres [84 hectares]) per person.

Throughout this period the potential military danger from Israel was a constant factor in the calculations of the U.A.R. government. It worked to strengthen ties with the Soviet bloc and to promote cooperation among the Arab states, even though such attempts usually failed. Nasser masked essential Egyptian moderation on the Israeli issue with a militant rhetoric of confrontation in order to preserve his standing in the Arab world.

The failure of the union with Syria had been a blow to Nasser’s Pan-Arab policy. To regain the initiative, Nasser intervened in 1962–67 on the republican side in Yemen’s civil war. This action led the U.A.R. into conflict with Saudi Arabia, which supported the Yemeni royalists, and with the United States, which backed the Saudis. Until then Nasser had managed to obtain substantial aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Because of congressional opposition to Nasser’s policies, U.S. aid was cut off in 1966.

This series of reversals figured prominently in Nasser’s decision to abandon his policy of “militant inaction” toward Israel. For 10 years, relative peace on the border with Israel had been maintained precariously by the presence of the UNEF stationed on the Egyptian side. In the Arab summit conferences of 1964 and 1965, Nasser had counseled restraint, but in 1966 events eluded his control. Palestinian incursions against Israel were launched with greater frequency and intensity from bases in Jordan, Lebanon, and, especially, Syria. A radical Syrian regime openly pledged support to the Palestinian guerrilla raids. On November 13, 1966, an Israeli strike into Jordan left 18 dead and 54 wounded. Taunted openly for hiding behind the UNEF, Nasser felt he had to act. The Egyptian president requested the UNEF’s withdrawal from the Sinai border. But that included, as UN Secretary-General U Thant interpreted the order, removing UN troops stationed at Sharm al-Shaykh at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. Egyptian troops there proceeded to close the gulf to Israeli shipping.

Israel had made it clear that blockading the gulf would be a cause for war. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched what it called a preemptive attack on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which led to a short conflict that came to be known as the Six-Day (or June) War. Israel’s victory over Egypt and its allies was rapid and overwhelming. Within the first hours of the war, all of Egypt’s airfields were struck, and most Egyptian planes were demolished on the ground. In the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian forces were defeated and put to flight. An estimated 10,000 Egyptians died, and the Israelis reached the Suez Canal on June 8. During the war, Israel occupied the entire Sinai Peninsula (along with territories belonging to the other Arab belligerents), and the Suez Canal was closed to traffic. Instead, the waterway became a fortified ditch between the two warring sides.

Egypt was crushed by the loss, all the more because the government media had painted a rosy but misleading picture of Egyptian operations during the opening days of the war. Nasser, humiliated, resigned, but there was a popular outpouring of support, only partially manipulated by the government, for him to remain in office. Regardless, the Nasser era was in fact over. Egypt rearmed rapidly, and a low-level conflict later known as the War of Attrition soon began along the canal with the Israeli army (particularly its air force). In both domestic and foreign affairs, however, Nasser began a turn to the right that his successor, Anwar Sadat, was to accelerate sharply.

(Read Britannica’s 1980 interview with Anwar Sadat.)

The Sadat regime

Nasser died on September 28, 1970, and was succeeded by his vice president, Sadat, himself a Free Officer. Although then viewed as an interim figure, Sadat soon revealed unexpected gifts for political survival. In May 1971 he outmaneuvered a formidable combination of rivals for power, calling his victory the “Corrective Revolution.” Sadat then used his strengthened position to launch a war with Israel in October 1973, thereby setting the stage for a new era in Egypt’s history.

The Sadat era really began with the October (Yom Kippur) War of 1973. The concerted Syrian-Egyptian attack on October 6 should have come as no surprise, given the continuing tensions along the canal zone (although the War of Attrition had ended shortly before Nasser’s death), but the Arab attack caught Israel completely off guard. Egypt held no illusions that Israel could be vanquished. Rather, the war was launched with the diplomatic aim of convincing a chastened, if still undefeated, Israel to negotiate on terms more favourable to the Arabs. Preparation for the war included Sadat’s announcement in July 1972 that nearly all Soviet military advisers would leave Egypt—partly because the Soviets had refused to sell offensive weapons to the Arab countries.

Egypt did not win the war in any military sense. As soon as Israel recovered from the initial shock of Arab gains in the first few days of fighting—and once the United States abandoned its early neutrality and resupplied Israel with a massive airlift of military supplies—the Israelis drove the Egyptians and Syrians back. A cease-fire was secured by the United States while Egyptian troops remained east of the Suez Canal and Israeli forces had crossed over to its western side.

Still, the initial successes in October 1973 enabled Sadat to pronounce the war an Egyptian victory and to seek an honourable peace. Egyptian interests, as Sadat saw them, dictated peace with Israel. Despite friction with his Syrian allies, Sadat signed the Sinai I (1974) and Sinai II (1975) disengagement agreements that returned the western Sinai and secured large foreign assistance commitments to Egypt. When Israeli inflexibility combined with Arab resistance to slow events, Sadat made a dramatic journey to Jerusalem on November 19, 1977, to address the Israeli Knesset (parliament). Tortuous negotiations between Egypt and Israel ensued. The climactic meeting in September 1978 of Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter at Camp David in Maryland produced a pair of agreements known as the Camp David Accords. Both Sadat and Begin were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace for these negotiations, and on March 26, 1979, the two leaders formally signed the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The agreement provided for peace between Egypt and Israel and set up a framework for resolving the complex Palestinian issue. Its provisions included the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces and civilians from Sinai within three years, the establishment of special security arrangements on the peninsula, the creation of a buffer zone along the Sinai-Israel border to be patrolled by UN peacekeeping forces, and the normalization of economic and cultural relations between the two countries, including the exchange of ambassadors. The status of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza territories and the issue of Palestinian autonomy were to be negotiated.

Sadat linked his peace initiative to the task of economic reconstruction, and proclaimed an open-door policy (Arabic: infitāḥ), hoping that a liberalized Egyptian economy would be revitalized by the inflow of Western and Arab capital. The peace process did produce economic benefits, notably a vast U.S. aid program, begun in 1975, that exceeded $1 billion annually by 1981.

The Sadat peace with Israel was not without its costs, however. As the narrowness of the Israeli interpretation of Palestinian autonomy under the Camp David agreement became clear, Sadat could not convince the Arab world that the accords would ensure legitimate Palestinian rights. Egypt lost the financial support of the Arab states and, shortly after signing the peace treaty, was expelled from the Arab League.

At home, a new constitution promulgated in 1971 significantly increased the power of individual citizens to participate in the political process, and by 1976 laws were instituted permitting the creation of political parties. But democratization of political life did not prove to be an acceptable substitute for economic revitalization. On January 18–19, 1977, demonstrations provoked by economic hardship broke out in Egypt’s major cities. Nearly 100 people were killed, and several thousand were either injured or jailed. The removal of the most oppressive features of Nasser’s rule, the return in controlled form to a multiparty system, and (at least initially) the Sadat peace with Israel were all welcomed. But, as Egypt entered the 1980s, the failure to resolve the Palestinian issue and to relieve mass economic hardships, heightened by the widening class gaps, undermined Sadat’s legitimacy. The West failed to notice this until, in September 1981, Sadat arrested some 1,500 of Egypt’s political elite.

Perhaps more ominous during the 1970s were the signs of rising Muslim extremism throughout the country. Under Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood had been firmly squelched. Sayyid Quṭb had been executed in 1966 for treason, but large numbers of Muslim activists—many of them radicalized by imprisonment and by Quṭb’s writings on jihad and the apostasy of modern Muslim culture—went underground. Under Sadat, groups of Muslim activists were given wide latitude to proselytize, particularly on Egypt’s university campuses, where it was hoped that they would counter lingering left-wing and Nasserite sentiment among the students, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood were released from prison and allowed to operate with relative freedom. Yet during that time there was a growing rise in religious violence, particularly directed against the country’s Coptic community but also, with growing frequency, against the government. The group al-Takfīr wa al-Hijrah (roughly, “Identification of Unbelief and Flight from Evil”—founded in 1967 after Quṭb’s execution) engaged in several terrorist attacks during the decade, and other groups, namely Egyptian Islamic Jihad (al-Jihād al-Islāmī; EIJ) and the Islamic Group (al-Jamāʿah al-Islāmiyah), formed with the goal of overthrowing Egypt’s secular state.

The Mubarak regime

Sadat’s assassination on October 6, 1981, by militant soldiers associated with (EIJ), was greeted in Egypt by uprisings in some areas but mostly by a deafening calm. It was with a profound sense of relief that Egyptians brought Hosni Mubarak, Sadat’s handpicked vice president, to power with a mandate for cautious change. As an air force general and hero of the Yom Kippur War, Mubarak had worked closely with Sadat since 1973.

During his first year as president, Mubarak struck a moderate note, neither backing away from the peace with Israel nor loosening ties with the United States. By pursuing that steady course, he was able to prevent any delay in the return of the occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty in April 1982. At the same time, Mubarak tried to contain the disaffections that had surfaced in the last year of Sadat’s era. He announced the end of the reign of the privileged minority that had dominated the invigorated private sector during the Sadat years. He also released Sadat’s political prisoners, while prosecuting vigorously the Islamic militants who had plotted the late president’s assassination. Unfortunately, Egypt’s worsening economic problems could not be solved quickly. But in his very first speeches Mubarak did frankly and perceptively identify Egypt’s economic shortcomings.

These solid beginnings were undercut when Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, only five weeks after the Jewish state’s final withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. In Egypt the invasion was perceived as an Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinian nationalism, and Mubarak was accused by his foes of allowing Israel to exploit Egypt’s disengagement. Official relations with Israel were severely strained until Israel initiated its partial withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985. However, Mubarak’s cautious policies did enable Egypt to repair its relationships with most of the moderate Arab states. At an Arab League summit in 1987, each government was authorized to restore diplomatic relations with Egypt as it saw fit; Iraq—which had been a leading critic of Sadat’s peace with Israel but by then was in a protracted war with Iran—took that opportunity to purchase military supplies from Egypt. Egypt resumed membership in the league two years later.

Within the country, opposition to a variety of political, economic, and social policies continued, chiefly among discontented labour and religious groups. The government contained labour strikes, food riots, and other incidents of unrest and adopted several measures aimed at curbing a determined drive by Islamic extremists to destabilize the regime.

In the late 1980s Egypt’s economy suffered markedly from falling oil prices and was further weakened by a drop in the number of remittances from its three million workers abroad. In spite of a rising debt burden, the government continued to rely heavily on foreign economic aid, leading to growing interference by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Egypt’s economic policies; in 1991 the Egyptian government signed the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program with the IMF and the World Bank. The country’s currency, the Egyptian pound, had to be devalued several times, interest rates were raised, and subsidies were lowered on food and fuel. These policies especially harmed the poorest Egyptians, who often looked to Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood for assistance. Some Muslim extremists, however, including EIJ and the Islamic Group, continued to resort to terrorism against political leaders, secularist writers, Copts, and even foreign tourists, the last-named being a major source of Egypt’s foreign exchange.

Politics in Egypt continued to follow authoritarian patterns, as Mubarak was reelected to the presidency without opposition in 1987, 1993, and 1999, and although opposition candidates contested the 2005 election, he was reelected that year as well. His National Democratic Party (NDP) continued to increase its majority of delegates in the People’s Assembly in the elections held every five years. The Muslim Brotherhood, unofficially allowed to revive under Sadat but never authorized to become a political party, threw its popular support to the New Wafd in one election and to the Liberal Socialists in another. It was widely believed that voting results were rigged to ensure that Mubarak’s supporters would win.

Although Egypt’s press was freer than it had been under Nasser or Sadat, Mubarak introduced a law in 1995 that would imprison journalists or party leaders who published news injurious to a government official. Popular pressure caused the Assembly to scale down the law, which was eventually voided by Egypt’s Constitutional Court. However, the growing censorship by the Islamic courts and the rector of al-Azhar University tempered freedom of speech and the press in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In its struggle against Islamist terrorism, Mubarak’s regime resorted to preventive detention and, allegedly, torture. Egyptian terrorists, for their part, assassinated several government ministers, nearly killed Mubarak himself in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1995, and gunned down tourists near Egypt’s most famous monuments—including an especially violent attack at Luxor in 1997. A leading Islamist, Sheikh ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, escaped to the United States, where he took part in a 1993 truck bomb attack on New York City’s World Trade Center and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for that crime and for conspiracy to commit further attacks. Another Islamist leader, a Cairene pediatrician named Ayman al-Zawahiri, fled to Afghanistan, where he led members of EIJ in joining the transnational terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Despite government initiatives to control the problem, domestic terrorism remains a threat to Egypt’s stability.

Some social and economic problems either stemmed from or were exacerbated by Egypt’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) on the side of the U.S.-led coalition. Egyptian troops took part in the conflict, as did soldiers from many Arab countries. Although Egypt was rewarded for its participation by forgiveness of billions of dollars that it owed for the purchase of arms from the West, many Egyptian expatriate workers lost their jobs in Iraq because of that country’s invasion of Kuwait. Likewise, Egypt’s hopes that its contractors would win bids to help rebuild Kuwait after the war were disappointed, and a plan to station Egyptian and Syrian troops as peacekeepers in the region was rejected by the Persian Gulf states. Perhaps understandably, financially strapped Egyptians began to resent wealthy Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other gulf Arabs who often spent their vacations gambling in Cairo’s luxury hotels.

The Egyptian public also grew skeptical of ongoing efforts by successive U.S. presidents and by their own president to promote peace between Israel and other Arab countries and, particularly, the Palestinians. In a changing global economy, there was a popular suspicion that such attempts at fostering better relations might have some ulterior motive. In particular, many Egyptians feared a possible U.S. and Israeli attempt to manipulate Egypt’s industries, especially since computer and information technology—both of which Egypt depended heavily on the West to obtain and use—became more vital to economic growth. Since 2004, however, expansion of the country’s Internet connectivity has ranked particularly high on the economic agenda of Egypt’s prime minister, Ahmad Nazif, himself a computer engineer.

In fact, Mubarak’s commitment to domestic development was evident in his choice of three successive economic planners to serve as prime minister during the 1990s. And though Egypt was becoming ever more sophisticated economically, it was doing so at a high price. Its independence was being curtailed by interference from international lenders such as the IMF, and a growing disparity in income and access to resources was straining relations between its rich and poor citizens as well as contributing to the erosion of unity between its Muslims and Copts. While some Muslims accused the Copts of serving as agents for foreign powers and of controlling Egypt’s economy, some Copts accused Muslims of destroying churches and compelling Egyptian Christians to convert to Islam. Although both Muslim and Christian Egyptians have, for the most part, made an effort to minimize their differences publicly in order to maintain national unity, rapid and uneven development has ultimately posed a threat to Egypt’s political and cultural leadership of the Arab world.

Internal tensions grew as the Mubarak regime continued to suppress opposition, arresting dissident leaders and restricting political expression. Widespread irregularities were observed in the legislative elections of November 2010, which the NDP won overwhelmingly, effectively eliminating opposition parties from the People’s Assembly.

Unrest in 2011: January 25 Revolution

Days after a popular uprising in Tunisia, known as the Jasmine Revolution, forced Pres. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power, protests against the Mubarak regime erupted on January 25, 2011. Thousands of protesters crowded into the main streets of downtown Cairo, chanting slogans against corruption, political repression, and poverty. The protests appeared to have been organized by networks of individuals communicating via social media, bypassing the leadership of Egypt’s established opposition groups. As protests continued, clashes between protesters grew more heated, resulting in mass arrests, injuries, and a few deaths. Protests erupted in other cities throughout the country, with especially violent clashes taking place in Suez and Alexandria. As the demonstrations progressed, Egypt’s established opposition groups increased their participation. On the third day of protests Mohamed ElBaradei, the leader of the opposition coalition National Association for Change, traveled to Cairo to participate in the demonstrations. The Muslim Brotherhood, the opposition group with the greatest popular support in Egypt, also announced that it would participate in demonstrations.

The protests reached a new level of violence on January 28, when thousands of demonstrators clashed with police following Friday prayers. Police attempted to control the protesters with tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets. Many protesters were beaten, either by uniformed police or by plainclothes security forces. The government began to take emergency measures, declaring a curfew and cutting off Internet and telephone service in many locations. As protests continued into the evening, police stations and NDP buildings throughout the country were attacked or set on fire by demonstrators. In Cairo the NDP national headquarters was burned, and protesters fought running battles with security forces in the street. Egyptian army units were deployed in downtown Cairo to protect key locations and buildings.

Late in the evening Mubarak appeared on state television, addressing the country for the first time since the outbreak of protests. He indicated that he intended to remain president, but he announced that he had asked his cabinet to resign immediately. He also acknowledged the protesters’ grievances by pledging to advance social reforms in Egypt. Most protesters dismissed the announcement as a desperate bid by Mubarak to remain in power, and protests continued.

As the crisis progressed, Mubarak took steps to reinforce his ties with Egypt’s senior military leadership. In addition to appointing several senior military officers to his new cabinet, Mubarak appointed a vice president for the first time in his presidency, choosing Omar Suleiman, the director of the powerful Egyptian General Intelligence Service. However, the Egyptian military’s stance toward the protests and the Mubarak regime remained uncertain. Army units in downtown Cairo refrained from using force against the demonstrators, and in some cases soldiers and officers appeared to signal their solidarity with the crowds. On January 31 the army announced on state television that it would not use force against demonstrators. Under increasing pressure as demonstrations intensified, Mubarak appeared on Egyptian state television on February 1 and announced that he would not run in Egypt’s next presidential election, scheduled for September 2011.

Mubarak’s announcement was immediately followed by some of the most brutal violence since the protests began. A crowd of Mubarak supporters fought antigovernment demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo, resulting in at least five deaths; an estimated 1,500 people were injured. It was widely suspected that many of the Mubarak supporters who participated in the fighting were members of the the regime’s plainclothes security force launching a coordinated attack on protesters. The army units stationed in the square struggled to separate Mubarak supporters and protesters, but fights continued to break out sporadically. Ahmed Shafiq, Egypt’s recently appointed prime minister, apologized for the violence that had taken place in Tahrir Square but denied that the actions of the Mubarak supporters had been directed by the government.

In early February members of the government, led by Suleiman, met with representatives of the opposition, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The government offered some concessions, including the release of political prisoners and increased media freedom. The offer was rejected by the opposition, which continued to demand that Mubarak leave office immediately. Protests continued in Egypt, although violence between security forces and protesters decreased. Thousands of protesters continued to occupy Tahrir Square, erecting tents to provide food and medical services. Egyptians from a number of industries, including doctors, textile workers, and transportation workers, engaged in strikes in solidarity with the protesters. Under continued pressure to step down immediately, Mubarak gave a televised speech on February 10. He promised to delegate some of his power to the vice president, amend the constitution to eliminate restrictions on who could run for president, and eventually lift the emergency law that had been in place since 1981. However, he refused to step down as president.

On February 11, as protesters frustrated by Mubarak’s refusal to step down assembled at locations around Cairo, including the presidential palace, it was announced that Mubarak and his family had departed the capital for Sharm al-Shaykh, a resort town on the Sinai Peninsula where he maintained a residence. The same day, the army issued a statement saying that as soon as protests in Egypt ended, the country’s emergency law would be lifted. That evening Suleiman appeared on state television to announce that Mubarak had stepped down as president, leaving the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, composed of Egypt’s highest-ranking military officers, to administer the country’s affairs. The announcement was met with jubilation among the crowds of protesters in Cairo.

Soon after Mubarak’s departure, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Egypt’s minister of defense, formally imposed martial law, suspending the constitution and dissolving the People’s Assembly and the Consultative Assembly. Mubarak’s cabinet was retained as a transitional body. The military government announced that it would continue to recognize treaties, including the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Tantawi stated that the military would remain in power until new elections could be held, possibly within six months.

As the military worked to restore order in Egypt, clearing the protesters out of Tahrir Square and calling for a return to normal life, thousands of workers held new demonstrations and strikes to call for better pay and better working conditions. A group of Egyptian police rallied in Cairo to demand higher wages. Police demonstrators also sought to improve the public image of the police, damaged by the perception that they had used excessive force against protesters, saying that the harsh police response had been ordered by the ministry of the interior.

Following Mubarak’s departure, Egyptian authorities began to investigate alleged corruption and abuses of power by Mubarak and his inner circle. On February 21 the Egyptian prosecutor general requested the freezing of the Mubarak family’s foreign assets. Shortly afterward a travel ban was issued, aimed at preventing Mubarak, who remained secluded in his villa at Sharm al-Shaykh, from leaving the country. In addition, a number of high-level Mubarak-era officials, NDP leaders, and businessmen suspected of corruption were arrested or prohibited from traveling.

On February 26 the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces approved a draft of constitutional amendments limiting the powers of the president and making elections more open. On March 4 a popular referendum on the amendments was scheduled for March 19.

Demonstrators had taken to the streets once again on February 25, this time to protest the composition of the interim cabinet, which had been appointed by the military and sworn in on February 22. Although opponents of the Mubarak regime were included in the new cabinet, protesters were angered that Mubarak allies retained a number of key portfolios, including defense, interior, justice, and foreign affairs, and that Shafiq, a Mubarak appointee, remained prime minister. Demonstrators continued to assemble in Tahrir Square to demand that the Mubarak-era ministers resign and to push other reforms, including the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the emergency law. On March 3 the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced Shafiq’s resignation, a day after he gave a widely criticized interview on Egyptian television. He was replaced as prime minister by Essam Sharaf, a former minister of transportation who became a vocal critic of the Mubarak regime after resigning in 2005.

On March 5 hundreds of Egyptians stormed offices of the State Security Investigations (SSI) agency in several cities, including the agency’s headquarters in Cairo, following rumours that officers had begun destroying documents showing human rights violations. Inside the compound, which was not staffed, the crowd seized documents, including surveillance files for individual Egyptians and records of operations against dissidents and opposition groups. Shortly after the raids, images of some of the seized documents were posted on pro-democracy Internet sites. On March 6 protesters who had gathered at the interior ministry building in Cairo to call for reform of the security services were attacked by plainclothes security forces, the first time that such forces had clashed with crowds of protesters since Mubarak’s departure.

Prime Minister Sharaf’s new caretaker government was sworn in on March 7. In the new cabinet officials with fewer ties to the former regime replaced the Mubarak loyalists who had remained from the previous cabinet. On March 15 the ministry of the interior announced the dissolution of the SSI. The state news agency reported that it would be replaced with a new security service that would not commit human rights violations or interfere with Egyptians’ political liberties.

The constitutional referendum promised by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took place on March 19. Constitutional changes that eased restrictions on candidacy in elections, set term limits for the president, and restricted the use of emergency laws were approved by 77 percent of Egyptian voters. Although the referendum passed by a wide margin, the main youth protest groups opposed it, saying that the changes did not go far enough and that a new constitution was needed instead. On March 30 the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued a constitutional declaration, intended to serve as an interim constitution in place of the constitution that was suspended in February. The document outlined the transition to an elected government, incorporating selections from the previous constitution as well as the amendments that were approved in the March 19 referendum. However, the constitutional declaration came amid procedural confusion: prior to the referendum, it had been widely understood that if the amendments were approved, the suspended constitution would be amended and reinstated.

In spite of progress toward reform, new tensions emerged between Egyptian pro-democracy activists and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Protest leaders questioned the military’s commitment to democratic change and charged that the army, eager to reestablish order following Mubarak’s ouster, had begun adopting the repressive tactics of the former regime. In late February and throughout March, army troops repeatedly used force to clear protest sites, often beating and arresting demonstrators. Human rights groups reported that some demonstrators suffered torture and sexual abuse while being detained by the army and that many were hastily convicted and imprisoned by military tribunals. A ruling by the interim cabinet in late March banned demonstrations and strikes, drawing further criticism.

On April 9 the military cracked down on protesters who had assembled in Tahrir Square to call for an investigation into Mubarak’s alleged corruption and abuse of power. The assault left two protesters dead and dozens injured. Amid growing public anger, the interim government opened an investigation of Mubarak’s finances. Mubarak responded by releasing his first public statement since his ouster, an audio recording in which he denied accusations that he had used his office to accumulate a fortune worth billions of dollars, concealed in foreign bank accounts. On April 13 Egyptian investigators placed Mubarak and his sons, Alaa and Gamal, under arrest. Mubarak, who had suffered an apparent heart attack while awaiting questioning, was formally detained while hospitalized. On May 24 the Egyptian public prosecutor announced that Mubarak, Alaa, and Gamal would stand trial for having ordered the killing of protesters as well as for corruption and abuse of power.

(For additional coverage of the unrest in Egypt in 2011 and subsequent political change, see Egypt Uprising of 2011.)

Transition to an elected government

Beginning in November 2011, Egypt held its first elections of the post-Mubarak era, with three rounds of voting for the members of the People’s Assembly. When voting was concluded in January, it was clear that the elections had been dominated by Egypt’s Islamist groups: the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won about 47 percent of the seats in the assembly, and the hard-line Nūr Party won about 25 percent.

The presidential race began in February with the announcement that elections would be held in May 2012, with a runoff in June 2012 if necessary. The first in a series of surprise legal and procedural reversals came in April, when the election commission disqualified nearly a dozen candidates, including two of the most prominent: Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s former intelligence chief, and Khairat al-Shater, a Muslim Brotherhood leader. When the first round of voting was held in May, Ahmed Shafiq, a former minister in the Mubarak administration, and Mohamed Morsi, the head of the Freedom and Justice Party, received the highest totals and advanced to the runoff.

Egyptian politics were shaken up again in June by a series of developments denounced by Islamists and political liberals as a “soft coup” carried out by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to retain power and prevent Islamists from gaining control of the legislative and executive branches of government. Just days before the presidential runoff on June 16 and 17, the Supreme Constitutional Court unexpectedly invalidated the results of the legislative elections held in 2011 and 2012, forcing dissolution of the Islamist-dominated People’s Assembly. The action was followed on June 17 by a surprise constitutional declaration by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces expanding its authority and placing new restrictions on the powers of the incoming president.

On June 24 Mohamed Morsi was declared the winner of the presidential election, and he took office at the end of the month. Although Morsi began his presidency in a state of apparent subordination to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, he moved to take the upper hand in mid-August, announcing the retirement of several senior members of the council and revoking the constitutional declaration of June 17.

The process of writing a new constitution became the focus of bitter contention between the Islamists and a loose opposition comprising liberal, secular, and Christian factions. The Islamists’ strong performance in parliamentary elections had allowed them to gain a dominant position in the first Constituent Assembly, a 100-member body tasked with drafting the constitution. Opposition members of the assembly, fearing that the Islamists’ dominance in that body would result in a constitution that ignored non-Islamists’ concerns, staged walkouts and filed lawsuits challenging the legality of the assembly. In April an Egyptian court had dissolved the assembly on procedural grounds, but a new Constituent Assembly formed in June met with the same complaints from the opposition, and boycotts continued.

On November 22, 2012, Morsi moved to address his contentious relations with Egypt’s judiciary and to sidestep legal challenges to the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly by issuing an edict exempting himself from judicial oversight and removing the courts’ power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Although Morsi defended the edict as a necessary measure to protect Egypt’s transition to democracy, mass demonstrations were held against what many saw as a seizure of dictatorial powers.

On November 30 the Constituent Assembly approved a draft constitution without the input of the boycotting Christian and secularist members. Morsi called for a referendum on the draft to be held on December 15. Both opponents and supporters of Morsi staged rallies around the country, resulting in some of the largest demonstrations since 2011. Crowds demanding Morsi’s ouster gathered at the presidential palace and ransacked several Muslim Brotherhood offices. As protests continued in early December, Morsi bowed to public anger and rescinded parts of his constitutional decree but retained the article preventing the courts from dissolving the Constituent Assembly. He declared martial law on December 9, authorizing the military to make arrests and keep order until the constitutional referendum could be held. The draft constitution was approved by voters and took effect in late December. Sporadic violent protests against Morsi’s rule continued into early 2013.

The June 30 Revolution

Worsening economic conditions, deteriorating public services, and a string of sectarian incidents exacerbated political polarization in mid-2013. Calls for Morsi’s resignation increased, led by a loose coalition including liberals, religious minorities, and Egyptians angered by high rates of unemployment and inflation. Clashes between Morsi’s supporters and critics in late June 2013 culminated in massive anti-Morsi protests around the country on June 30, the first anniversary of his inauguration. The protests were the largest since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak two years earlier and included calls for the military to intervene to oust Morsi in a similar manner. More than a dozen people were killed, and many more were injured.

On July 1, with Egypt seemingly on the brink of a major crisis, the head of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, declared that the military was ready to intervene to prevent chaos in the country if the two sides were unable to resolve their differences within two days. Morsi responded to the protests by offering negotiations with the opposition but refused to step down. Protests continued, and on July 3 the military made good on its ultimatum, temporarily suspending the constitution, removing Morsi from the presidency, and creating a new interim administration to be led by the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour. As Mansour was tasked with implementing the military’s transition road map, however, it was clear that he ultimately answered to Sisi.

While senior military officials worked to assemble a transitional cabinet, the Muslim Brotherhood boycotted invitations to participate in the transition, and members held demonstrations around the country to protest Morsi’s removal. While these demonstrations showed that there was significant opposition to Morsi’s removal, the military was also able to muster significant support. In late July Sisi called on Egyptians to take to the streets on July 26 for a mandate “to confront terrorism and violence.” On July 26, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians rallied in support of the military.

The next day security forces killed nearly 100 demonstrators at a rally for the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. It was the second lethal mass response to a Muslim Brotherhood-led protest, after security forces opened fire on a crowd of Morsi supporters outside a military base on July 8, killing at least 50 people and wounding hundreds more. The military had maintained the July 8 response was due to a need to defend a military base against armed attackers. On August 14 security forces took action to break up Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque in Cairo, killing more than 1,000 over a period of several days while descending on protesters’ encampments. In the aftermath of the attack, Egyptian authorities declared a state of emergency, an action seen by many as restoring the military authoritarianism of the Mubarak era.

The new government also cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization. A number of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, including Morsi, had been placed under arrest as early as Morsi’s ouster, and television stations affiliated with the organization were shut down. The Muslim Brotherhood was formally dissolved in September. Meanwhile, accused Muslim Brotherhood activists and supporters were rounded up and convicted in mass trials for a variety of crimes allegedly committed during the protests following Morsi’s removal. Death sentences were passed against hundreds of accused members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including many who had been convicted in absentia, in the spring of 2014.

Many feared that the new administration’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood would provoke violent resistance by Islamists, and the months following Morsi’s removal did indeed witness a series of attacks by Islamist militants against police and military targets. The Egyptian military launched counterinsurgency operations in response, especially in the Sinai Peninsula, where most of the militant groups were based.

In September 2013 the interim government set out to transition back to a constitutional government. It appointed a committee to amend the constitution written in 2012 by the Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly. Intended to represent a cross section of Egyptian society, the committee’s 50 members were drawn from a variety of Egyptian institutions and groups. The Muslim Brotherhood was unrepresented, while two members represented the more conservatively Islamist Nūr Party. Unsurprisingly, the committee removed or weakened many of the provisions favoured by Islamists in the 2012 constitution and bolstered language enshrining the military and the police as autonomous institutions shielded from civilian oversight. The amended text passed with more than 98 percent of the vote in a referendum in January 2014.

The new constitution allowed elections to be held in May 2014. Sisi had repeatedly denied having any ambition to stand in the presidential election, but he enjoyed substantial popularity and was seen by many as the country’s best hope for economic and political stability. In March he reversed his previous denials and announced that he would resign from the military to run for president.

The overwhelming favourite, Sisi campaigned on promises to reduce poverty through a variety of development programs and to maintain national security, which included a continued crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. As expected, the election in May 2014 produced a lopsided victory for Sisi against his only opponent, the leftist Hamdeen Sabahi.