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Prelude: Countdown to the July 1952 Coup

The outcome of revolution rarely corresponds with the intentions of those who carry it out, and both the 1952 coup and the 2011 uprising in Egypt are ample proof. Still, exploring the background and intentions of those who attempted to overthrow their rulers helps unlock the logic of the regimes they unintentionally produced. So what exactly inspired the July 23, 1952 coup, which was carried out by a secret cabal of junior officers, calling themselves the Free Officers Movement, and set the stage for Egypt’s new regime?

Egypt had been occupied by the British since 1882, under the pretext of protecting the Egyptian sovereign from his own army. In other words, when their predecessors in the military intervened in politics to demand greater rights for officers and citizens, they brought nothing but disaster. For decades, Egypt lay at the mercy of a stifling colonial mandate that not only exploited its resources, and dismissed monarchs and cabinets that defied its will, but also kept the army understaffed, unequipped, and trained for little more than parade ground marches—even when Egyptians won nominal independence and a constitution in 1923, it was through a massive revolt that civilians (spearheaded by the liberal al-Wafd Party) ignited four years earlier, without any military participation. Worse, three decades after this glorious upheaval, the British still had the upper hand. The young and promising King Farouk, who ascended the throne in 1936 (at the age of sixteen), could scarcely rule freely with the British army stationed a few miles away from his capital, and his frustration was redirected toward the country’s shaky parliamentary system. To assert royal prerogative in the face of the Wafd majority party, he developed the habit of fabricating reasons (sometimes in agreement with the British) to dissolve parliament, dismiss elected cabinets and place royalists on the political saddle. He even went so far as to form a secret assassination squad, known as the Iron Guards, to dispose of his political enemies. Al-Wafd, in turn, felt morally justified to ally with anyone (including the British) to guarantee their democratic right to lead parliament and the executive. This cat-and-mouse game between the crown and the majority party not only poisoned domestic politics, it empowered the British even further. Exasperation with formal politics diverted popular energy toward a rising religious movement that claimed that national independence could only be achieved through moral reform and strict adherence to Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood, a movement established in the port city of Ismailia on the Suez Canal in 1928, was gaining new followers by the day. Its ranks had swelled by the late 1940s to an alleged 2 million supporters, which represented 10 percent of the population.

This was the Egypt under which the Free Officers (most of them in their thirties at the time of the coup) had come of age. But politics was not the only thing on the mind of those patriotic members of the Free Officers; social disparities and stagnation were equally alarming at the time. Although over half of Egypt’s 21 million inhabitants were employed in agriculture, 12,000 large and middling land­owners (crowned by 147 elite families) controlled a third of arable land, while close to 11 million peasants remained landless. Observers at the time hoped that the budding capitalist class, emboldened by a sudden influx of wealth, would level the social field by breaking the economic monopoly of this archaic landed class. Egyptian merchants had amassed great fortunes by selling cotton, the country’s main export product, at prices inflated by the American Civil War in the 1860s, and again by making the best out of the demand created by the two world wars. However, merchants were slow in making the transition to industrialism. In the 1950s, manufacturing contributed a mere 8 percent to the national income, and most of Egypt’s 1.3 million workers were little more than glorified artisans.¹ More importantly, the country’s nascent industrialists did not seem determined to transform the regime politically. In other developing countries, especially those laboring under the colonial yoke like Egypt, capitalists usually encouraged coups. Failing to dismantle (or share power with) the landed elite, fearful of radical popular forces, and eager to industrialize the country as rapidly as possible, capitalists elect to hand over political power to a strong executive capable of protecting and furthering their economic interests. That is to say: the bourgeoisie surrendered the sword to the military dictatorship to save the purse.

Egypt had all the ingredients that favored such a scenario during the period preceding the coup. The mostly absentee landed class remained set in its ways, refusing calls for land reform and resisting commercialization and capitalization of agriculture, preferring to squander its wealth on the conspicuous consumption of imported luxuries. More dangerously, it undercut local demand in the countryside by reducing wages and increasing rents. To top it off, capitalists felt politically helpless next to this landed class, occupying only a humble 14 percent of seats in the last parliament before the coup (elected in 1950), compared with the landowners’ 63 percent.² At the same time, the British occupation and the perceived corruption of political life fueled radical and fascist tendencies among students, professionals, and workers. The demonstrations, strikes, and political assassinations of the postwar years were hardly conducive to business.

Meanwhile, the officer corps itself was becoming larger and middle class in composition. Although the British had for long made sure the army remained limited in size and staffed by meek aristocrats, the gathering storm of Nazism forced it to revise its position and prepare a somewhat reliable force for the dark days ahead—hence their infusion of the military with middle-class members (the sons of middling landowners, professionals, and merchants), those who could actually fight. As part of the preparation for a possible war, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty reallocated British officers to the strategic Suez Canal Zone and sanctioned an enlarged Egyptian military to defend the cities and provide logistical support. Over the following decade, the army expanded from 3,000 to 100,000 men, and while its size was reduced after it had served its purpose in the Second World War, it remained relatively large at 36,000 men. The founders of the Free Officers Movement belonged to the first batch of middle-class youth that joined the Military Academy in the late 1930s (eight of the eleven ringleaders came from landless families), and they naturally resented the privileges of the landed elite.³ It is also conceivable that, by virtue of their links with the British army, Egyptian officers learned to appreciate the importance of modern democratic statehood, and realized that their control over the means of violence put them in the best position to transform their own society accordingly.

Nonetheless, Egyptian capitalists remained wedded to the old aristocracy until the very end. Despite their eagerness to do away with this spendthrift and thoughtless class, they favored compromise over revolution. Egypt’s still limited industrialization meant that its proletariat was too small and dispersed to make a bid for power. Increasing radicalization in the cities was perhaps unsettling, but it was certainly far from threatening. Capitalists believed there was still time for reform. Also, massive peasant revolts were equally unlikely because the Egyptian state (comparable to Russia in 1905, and unlike France in 1789) had strong control mechanisms in place in the countryside. Like their Russian counterparts in 1917, Egyptian capitalists worried that spearheading a revolt against the landowning class might ultimately work against them: that the ensuing turmoil might sweep away all economic elites, landlords and industrialists alike.

While the bourgeoisie was still weighing its options, the 1952 coup seemed to present a reasonable way out: it promised to undermine large landowners, encourage industry, and keep social unrest in check. Capitalists, therefore, welcomed the coup at first, though they certainly played no role in initiating it, nor did they manage to control the forces it unleashed. Nor were the Free Officers committed liberals seeking to modernize Egypt in the interests of capitalism. If anything, the movement was notorious for its ideological eclecticism: a few of its members were Islamists; some were socialists, Communists, or fascists; many were pragmatists; and the majority did not think beyond removing the corrupt political elite and returning to the barracks.

So if the coup was neither designed to save a distressed capitalist class nor to modernize and democratize Egypt, what really motivated it? A brief survey of the decade leading to the coup reveals three factors that impinged directly on the military’s image and corporate interests: first, humiliation at home and abroad; second, the increased reliance on the military for domestic repression; and third, transferring control over military affairs from elected government to the monarch.

Most historians have noted the demoralizing effect of the so-called February 4, 1942, incident, when officers stationed around the royal palace stood powerless as British tanks surrounded them and forced King Farouk, almost at gunpoint, to replace the existing government (suspected of Nazi sympathies) with one led by the liberal al-Wafd. Although the king did not call on the army to interfere, the officers’ pride was irrevocably bruised as they watched their sovereign humiliated by the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson (Lord Killearn), while they stood by impotent. Four hundred officers, including the founder and leader of the Free Officers Movement, infantry lieutenant colonel Gamal Abd al-Nasser, met three days later at the Officers Club and decided to organize resistance against British troops. They sent a delegation led by another Free Officer, artillery major Salah Salem, to inform the monarch of their decision, only to be warned by his chamberlain that such a provocation could only push Britain to further escalate.⁴ The whole incident left the officers bitter toward the whole political elite: the cowardly king who obeyed foreign dictates, the opportunist majority party that formed a government under foreign tutelage, and of course, the British bullies. In a letter to a school friend, a devastated Nasser bemoaned: “I am ashamed of our army’s powerlessness.”⁵ Major General Muhammad Naguib of the Border Guards, who Nasser later enlisted as a figurehead for the movement (believing that his seniority would lend credibility to the coup), tendered his resignation after the army failed to uphold the country’s honor, and described the incident in his memoirs as the turning point that convinced him that a regime change was needed.⁶ This distressing episode was also highlighted in the memoirs of other leading Free Officers, such as cavalry lieutenant colonel Khaled Muhi al-Din, who together with Nasser devoured piles of history and philosophy books and explored various political movements in search of a way out for Egypt, as well as signal corps major Anwar al-Sadat, who was imprisoned by the British during the war because of his pro-German activities and was only readmitted to the ranks after secretly joining the king’s Iron Guards (while doubling as member of the anti-royalist Free Officers).

But as disheartening as this episode was, the real military disaster took place six years later, in Palestine. The establishment of the State of Israel on Egypt’s eastern border prompted an impromptu intervention by the Egyptian military against this new, unwelcome entity. The operation was framed as a defense of Palestinian rights, but it was also an attempt by the crown to play a leading role in the Arab world and thereby regain some of its lost prestige. Dozens of Egyptian officers volunteered to help prevent the wholesale dispossession of their Palestinian neighbors, but they were worried about embroiling the military in a formal war—after all, the last time it had seen combat was 1882, when it tried, fruitlessly, to prevent the British invasion of Egypt. The Palestine War of 1948 would therefore be the first military engagement in over half a century. Furthermore, the army was utterly unprepared in terms of training and equipment, for even though the British employed other colonial armies in their war effort (notably, the Indian), they reserved the Egyptian forces for logistical support. The military’s reluctance to fight was voiced by the general staff, and supported by the elected government. King Farouk, however, vetoed both generals and ministers and sent his men to their doom. Defeat inevitably followed. Morale was so low within the military that from September–December 1948, 28 officers and 2,100 soldiers were arrested on the battlefield and deported to Egypt for mutiny.⁷ The tragedy turned to scandal when Egyptian Senate hearings in 1949 revealed that European governments, eager to get rid of their defunct weapons from both world wars, offered the king’s courtiers substantial commissions to help them unload their stockpiles.⁸ To add insult to injury, Nasser was included in the delegation sent to the Greek island of Rhodes in February 1949 to negotiate the first Arab-Israeli truce, a political defeat no less humiliating than the military one.

These devastating defeats were unquestionably what politicized the officer corps. It is no coincidence that the first leaflet distributed by the Free Officers, in November 1949, was devoted to condemning those responsible for the Palestine catastrophe, and the first communiqué they issued after the coup denounced the treacherous politicians responsible for the army’s defeat in 1948.⁹ In another letter to his school friend, Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers, invoked the image of their soldiers “dashed against fortifications … using defective arms which had been purchased by the king’s cronies, a collection of petty crooks who profited from the war by realizing huge commissions from arms deals.”¹⁰ He also described how his battalion had no maps or tents, how he and his men were left without logistic support, subject to contradictory orders from incompetent palace officers. Nasser had spent weeks under siege in the Palestinian village of Fallujah, where he and fellow officers came to see that the civilian leadership was utterly responsible for their current ordeal. Naguib, who was injured twice during the war, reached the same conclusion: the real enemy was in Cairo.¹¹

Yet the situation worsened: infuriated soldiers returned home only to find thousands of their countrymen locked up in detention centers, because the king saw the Palestine War as a good opportunity to declare martial law and silence the opposition. The monarch expected the army to finish the job and repress civilian demonstrators, especially after the police proved unreliable—in October 1947 seven thousand police officers organized anti-government strikes, which continued intermittingly until 1952.¹² Things became still more complicated when Britain retracted its promise to evacuate Egypt after the war, and in October 1951, the Egyptian government unilaterally abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in protest. The Egyptian military was caught in an awkward position. The treaty had legitimatized British presence in the Suez Canal Zone, but now Britain officially became an occupying force once more. In its rhetoric, the government encouraged citizens to carry out armed attacks against British installations, but then required the army to prevent them. The situation exploded two months later when British forces began scourging villages for sheltering Egyptian “terrorists.” Following a particularly nasty incident, when the British demolished the village of Kafr Abdu, officers sent a petition to the king and government asking permission to defend Egyptian sovereignty, but the petition was ignored. A month later, seven thousand British troops occupied the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. The government ordered the police to resist. In the bloody battle, 50 police officers were killed and 80 injured. The occasion was marked as Police Day, and henceforth, January 25 was celebrated annually in honor of the police martyrs (the revolt of 2011 started on that day to underline the disparity between the heroic police of yesterday and the brutal one of today). The following morning, rioters set fire to downtown Cairo. The army was ordered in to restore calm, but officers now felt they were becoming the henchmen of a regime that had lost all legitimacy—as evidenced by the fact that four cabinets ruled in quick succession from January–July 1952¹³. It became clear that there was a power vacuum in Egypt and that none of the political forces were ready to capture the moment, simply because they only thought of power in terms of “the force of numbers, the force of the masses, and never the force of arms.”¹⁴

A final, though less spectacular factor, which had an enormous impact on officers, was the expansion of the monarch’s jurisdiction over military affairs. Throughout his reign, the king strove to wrest effective control of the army from elected governments. As a mark of symbolic power, he changed the army emblem in October 1944 from “God, Country and King” to “God, King and Country.” King Farouk not only refused to be held accountable for his ill-fated decision to send the military to the Palestine War, he now demanded the right to appoint the war minister and the chief of staff, and to create the new position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces—to be occupied by someone beholden to him alone and responsible for all military appointments and promotions. In order to appease the king, the Wafd government agreed in 1950 to relinquish its constitutional right to control the military. Immediately, the king set to work. The list of incompetents he appointed to leading army positions included his diplomat brother-in-law and his corrupt prison warden, who forced prisoners to till the king’s land for free. His intention to install a malicious border patrol officer (who had barely survived assassination at the hands of Nasser) to the top military post days before the coup was one of its immediate causes. Naguib reflected the general dismay within the ranks when he complained to confidants that the army could not obey a high command composed of arms dealers, land speculators, and other criminal elements.¹⁵ When the old general was elected chairman of the Officers Club against the royalist candidate in January 1952, it became clear that the palace was losing the loyalty of the corps.

Institutional grievances of this magnitude certainly explain why the coup was endorsed (or at least allowed) by the armed forces as a whole. Regardless of the social, political, or ideological motives of the ringleaders, the coup succeeded because it was perceived by scores of officers and soldiers as strictly for the benefit of their esteemed institution. In their view, the coup was not a matter of disrupting military discipline, but rather of reestablishing it. Their aim was to liberate Egypt from foreign occupation and install a reformed civilian regime that would enhance military power and restore its credibility. They were neither set on assuming political power nor on administering a transformative socioeconomic modernization program, while the quick turnover of military governments in Iraq (between 1936 and 1941) and Syria (between 1949 and 1951) alerted them to the inherent instability of military rule. Nasser and his close allies in the movement, however, thought otherwise. Captivated by the Turkish officer-turned-revolutionary-turned-stateman Mostafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, they saw the coup as only a first step in the long-term and far-reaching “revolution from above” that would build a strong centralized state with a modern industrial economy. Herein lies the root of the struggle that would consume the country for the next six decades.