Fu'ad Siraj al-Din and the Egyptian Wafd
1980; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/002200948001500407
ISSN1461-7250
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoThe career of Fu'ad Pasha Siraj al-Din has attracted no sustained attention in either Arabic or Western-language histories of modern Egypt. His name flits through accounts of Egyptian politics in the last decade before the 1952 revolution a sentence here, a paragraph there but no-one tells much about him. He appears as the strong man behind the aging Wafdist leader Mustafa alNahhas, the reputed lover of Nahhas's wife Zaynab, a skillful political manipulator, and a reactionary landlord-pasha. But nowhere is there even a brief connected account of his life and political activities. Perhaps this should come as no surprise. Sa'd Zaghlul has only recently found a major if iconoclastic critical biographer,' and Nahhas has only his hagiographers. Yet without a knowledge of Siraj al-Din's career our understanding of the critical years leading up to the 1952 revolution must remain inadequate. This article focuses on Siraj al-Din's life and political career within the context of the larger history of Egypt, the Wafd party, and AngloEgyptian relations. Fu'ad Siraj al-Din's father and grandfather were landowners, pashas, and 'umdas (mayors) of their village Kafr al-Garayda in the delta province of Gharbiya.2 The father, Siraj al-Din Pasha Shahin (1879-1934) had studied in a French school in the provincial capital of Tanta. Like so many of Egypt's newly emerging landed aristocrats, he solidified the family's Cairo connexions in the 1920s, buying a luxurious villa in fashionable Garden City (at 10 Ahmad Pasha Street) and holding a seat in the parliaments of 1924, 1925, and 1931. His ornate baroque villa, which had belonged to the director of the Austrian bank, had once been decorated in an-
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