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by Samir Raafat
Egyptian Mail, Saturday, December 17, 24 & 31, 1994
Adly Yeken's 1926 Wafd cabinet with Ali Chamsi Bey far right
Amin Chamsi Pasha's grandson Prime Minister Ali Sabry (L) with Gamal Abdel Nasser + Krishna Menon at Bandung Conference, Indonesia (1955)
below: Ali Sabry + President Gamal Abdel Nasser + El Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara(1965)
Amin Chamsi Pasha's granddaughter Siadat Raafat (L) with Princess Fawzia of Egypt ex-Empress of Persia (1940s)
Dr. Wahid Raafat receiving highest award from President Hosni Mubarak 1980s
This is about a bourgeois Egyptian family, mainly its awesome patriarch Amin Chamsi (also spelt Shamsi, Shemsi, Semsi). From his provincial hometown of Zagazig in the Nile Delta he sought to enhance Orabi's revolt of 1882. Three quarters of a century later, his grandchildren, the Sabrys and Mareis, were at the epicenter of power in the heyday of Nasser's Egypt.
It is also about another grandson, Egypt's eminent jurist Wahid Raafat who paid a steep price for refusing to play ball with Nasser's regime but was nevertheless regularly consulted by the latter's successors.
In between these two different generations comes out the prodigal son Ali Chamsi, co-founder and later dissenter of the Wafd Nationalist Party. As cabinet minister he served two kings, was Egypt's first representative to the League of Nations, and considered by many as one of the most respected banker-politicians of his generation.
Before we discuss three generations of Chamsis who served the state, let's find dwell briefly on the origins of this family that first appeared on scene in the early 1700s in what was then Ottoman Egypt. Later, as we wind down to the 20th century, we'll come across a soldier from a mountain village in the Balkans whose destiny brought him to the Nile valley where he created his own mini-dynasty.
The first known Chamsis go back to the mid-18th century. Most probably they came to Egypt from Asia Minor either as Mamluks or as a part of a military detachment sent to join the ranks of the Ottoman Army of Occupation.
A paper trail consisting of three different Waqfs (Islamic Trust/Endowment) give us insight to this family.
The most recent of the three is dated 5 Ramadan 1222 Hegira (July 1812) drawn up by Sir-wan Mohammed al-Chamsi and his wife, Arifa Khatoun bint Mustafa al-Kashef al-Moerly.
Like most Cairene notables Mohammed and Arifa resided in the then-elegant district of Sayeda Zeinab known at the time as Qantaret al-Seba'a (Lions' Bridge). They owned several pieces of property near the renowned mosque where the remains of the Prophet's granddaughter are allegedly buried.
According to the 1812 waqf/trust, Mohammed was Sir-wan or Captain of the Guards in the service of al- Wazir Mohammed Ali Pasha now in his seventh year of reign over Egypt by the grace of the Ottoman Sultan.
A subsequent amendment by Arifa to the above Waqf shows that parts of Mohammed al-Chamsi's real estate and assets were placed in three separate trusts drawn up between 1812 and 1830 each with its own set of codicils. In one of these there is mention of 60 feddans of agriculture land "black mud known as silt" in Mansurah province. These were earmarked for charitable purposes waqf khairi religious endowment.
Another entry in the 1812 waqf is for the benefit of Mohammed's uncle, Hassan Agha Ekhtiar. It states that money was to be distributed and the Qur'an read out on a given night each year in his honor.
The venue for this religious charity is Tamriz al-Ahmadi mosque in the Sayeda Zeinab district. The mosque is adjacent to Mohammed al-Chamsi's residence on the fringes of a quarter known as Darb al-Chamsi.
Amir Tamriz al-Ahmadi al-Zahiry had built his mosque in 1477 during the heyday of Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf Qa'it Bay's reign. In the book 'Islamic Monuments of Cairo' we learn that the mosque overlooked the Khalig Canal which disappeared in 1933 when the canal was filled in to make way for modern Cairo. Today the mosque stands at No.2 Port Saiid Street.
More information is found in Professor Hassan Abdel Wahab's voluminous work Massajid Al-Qahira--Mosques of Cairo. Therein we learn that the man responsible for the mosque's restoration in 1766 was Hassan Agha Ekhtiar.
"Al-Amir Hassan Agha Ekhtiar is the son of al-Amir Mohammed Agha Tufkejian " writes Hassan Abdel Wahab. And in another section of his work he mentions that an employee of the state called Mohammed al-Chamsi is buried inside the mosque. He does not connect Mohammed Chamsi to Hassan Agha Ekhtiar and the Tufkejians.
But as it turns out both amirs mentioned by Abdel Wahab tally with the names in Chamsi's 1812 Waqf, principally in the section listing Mohammed Chamsi's genealogy, a typical requirement in such documents.
Supporting evidence is found in Abdel Rahman al-Djabarti's landmark 'Cairo Chronicles' where the quintessential historian mentions the Chamsis at different intervals. He especially highlights the marriage of one of them, Mohammed Chamsi's paternal grandfather, to Ruqaya al-Qadiri al-Husseini, a descendant of the Prophet.
In another section, this time in the year 1167 H. (1753 AD), Djabarti gives a synopsis of Egypt's leading families during the pre-Mohammed Ali era. According to the chronicler the Chamsis were among the top twenty.
Later Djabarti tells us that in 1768 Hassan al-Chamsi and his brothers were exiled to the Hejaz for insubordination to the wali--ruler. They're soon allowed back in Cairo in 1776 presumably having been pardoned by the new wali.
At a later entry, Djabarti says al-Sirwan Mohammed Chamsi was responsible for organizing the wedding procession of one of Viceroy Mohammed Ali's daughters in 1228 H. (circa 1813 AD) with no further details.
Sir-wan Mohammed al-Chamsi died shortly thereafter while in the service of the state.
Another Chamsi descendant appears during the reign of Viceroy Mohammed Ali's grandson, Ismail Pasha, Egypt's first khedive. According to Ayub's 'Egypt Under the Reign of Ismail', a Taha Chamsi Pasha who is listed as nazir--director of the Khassa Khediwia or privy purse, was involved in the preparations of the celebrated weddings of the sons," when Khedive Ismail married off his three sons in one go.
Why the name 'Chamsi' is still to be determined. It is however evident that once it took on the name survived four generations before becoming extinct in 1964 with the death of the last male descendant.
The name Tufkejian meanwhile was discontinued with the arrival on scene of Sir-wan Mohammed Chamsi. With a waning Ottoman Empire giving way to regional nationalism, none of the ensuing Chamsis thought it necessary to revive what would soon be regarded as an 'imported' name.
To discuss the next bunch of Chamsis, we leapfrog one generation landing in the bandar or town of Zagazig, the provincial capital of Sharkia, which at the time was the largest town in Lower Egypt besides being the chief cotton market in the region. Very little is known on how this transition took place, whereby four generations of urban Chamsis, all of them military men, gave way to a rural town merchant dabbing in nationalist politics. Most probably, Mohammed Ali's land reform program where he redistributed Egypt's agrarian land favoring his officers and state employees had something to do with it.
The modern Chamsis' fame and fortune was a two-edged sword, earning them both the wrath and admiration of Egypt's khedives, kings, and presidents.
The first of these latter-day Chamsis was Amin Pasha (1833-1913) who during the latter half of the Nineteenth century, was Sharkia's deputy to the elected 1881 Majlis al-Umma or Chamber of Delegates.
Convened at the Ministry of Public Works (site of today's Shura Council next door to Parliament House), the majlis was made up of Egypt's leading mercantile and feudal squires most of whom were from outside the Circassian ruling class--les cents families as the French would say.
Aside from his seat in this overconfident conclave, Chamsi also held the influential post of sir-tujar (merchant provost) and naqeeb Ashraafof Zagazig, the capital of Sharkia, the Nile Delta's largest province.
Along with Ahmed Abaza, chief of the large Abaza clan, Amin Chamsi was seen as one of the leading capitalists of Sharkia. Owning and running his own cotton ginning mill, he was the appointed agent for various agricultural machinery including Ruston-Proctor pumps. Yet it was no secret that Chamsi's activities went well beyond the already wide competence of his commercial business. With the growing influence of the British in Egypt, he had taken a partisan stand against military and economic colonialism, a sentiment that would subsequently be perpetuated by several of his descendants.
At first, Amin Chamsi was a prominent supporter of the ruling Circassian oligarchy. As though to renew his allegiance, he was one of the first to contribute to the Tewfik Charity Fund in April 1881 becoming one of its board members later on. It was also at the Chamsi homestead that Khedive Mohammed Tewfik Pasha was an honored guest during his Nile Delta inspection tour of April 1880.
In his book 'Court Life in Egypt', Alfred J. Butler, who accompanied the Khedive on his inspection tour, sheds light on this event. "We dined at the house of Amin Bey, a rich landed proprietor. It was dinner a la Turque; but in the open air, under vine-trellises and surrounded by roses, one could endure a good deal. Our host waited on us, and noticed the embarrassment of the Europeans."
The following day the Khedive and his retinue were once again the guests of Amin Chamsi.
But this time, recounts Butler, "Amin Bey astonished us at luncheon that day; for, instead of the Turkish meal we had expected, we found under our vine-bower a long table covered with a snowy cloth; dishes piled with delicious fruits standing amid pots of splendid flowers, iced champagne and claret, and, above all, plates, knives, and forks to the heart's content. Amin Bey, with his usual cleverness, had taken the hint of last night, and had made this surprising transformation. He wished to do us honour; only at first he mistook our tastes. I believe since then the great man has fallen with oriental swiftness."
Revealing words written in 1887 by the English tutor of young Princes Abbas Hilmi and Mohammed-Ali (Tewfik).
The 'great man' had fallen indeed. Sensing he had been let down by some of his notables during Orabi's 1882 insurgency dubbed garimet al-Essban, that same khedive would turn against Amin Chamsi. Aside from jailing the Sharkia oligarch, the khedive saddled him with a bail amounting to L.E. 5,000, the largest of his reign, and which ultimately led to Chamsi's bankruptcy.
Details of the sentence was listed in the al-Waqka'i, the government's official journal along with a mention of a bail-posting of L.E. 4,000 for Lamloum Sa'dy Bey, Murad Seoudi Bey, and Osman Fawzi Pasha, important notables from different Egyptian provinces. As for the other recalcitrant from Sharkia, Ahmed Abaza Bey, his bail amounted to L.E. 2,000. All five were placed under house arrest and deprived of honors, titles and rank.
Amin Chamsi and Ahmed Abaza, heretofore the grandees of Sharkia, had thus been downgraded to ordinary citizens.
In the case of Amin Chamsi, a family account says his humiliation went further than the hefty financial fine and social demotion, for his jailer and nemesis was none other than Ahmed Farid Pasha, a powerful enemy from the past. The growing enmity between the two men became evident when the latter was re-appointed Mudir--governor of Sharkia in 1880-1.
The on-going feud between the ambitious mudir and the wily sir-tujar had started in 1877, during the reign of Khedive Ismail. The issue was a large property coveted by both strong-headed men. But just before Farid could muscle in on the kill, he was transferred to another government posting. If Chamsi had as a result won the first round he would loose several others, for Farid Pasha would keep returning to Sharkia, up until his retirement on 23 December 1895.
Upon re-assuming office in Sharkia during the early reign of Mohammed Tewfik, Farid Pasha immediately had sought to contain and marginalize Chamsi's local influence. At first he resorted to excluding him from both social and official functions in an effort to diminish his standing within the community. This was then escalated to harassment tactics some of which made it to the press. Next came the warrant for Chamsi's arrest on trumped up charges. Taking it a level further, Farid Pasha proceeded to place his yes-men in key positions and appointed Hassan Eidarous, a well to do landowner, to the post of sir-tujar in lieu of Amin Chamsi.
But mudirs came and went with each change of season and Amin Chamsi was the first to know it. No sooner had Farid Pasha been replaced by Ali Ghaleb Pasha in mid-1881, when orders arrived from Cairo to reinstate the old sir-tujar and his team. Likewise, the honorific post of naqeeb for Zagazig reverted once more to Chamsi, this time by order of al-Sayid Abdel Baqui Effendi al-Bakri, head of Egypt's Ashraafs, an honorary post reserved to descendants of Prophet Mohammed.
Although there was no personal vendetta between Farid Pasha and Ahmed Abaza Bey, the roots of discord went back a few years when senior members of that clan were implicated in the title-for money scandal. In order to acquire important positions within the public service, such as mudir or town-council chief, the Abazas generously bribed Ismail Pasha al-Mufattish, the corrupt minister of finance. To recoup their investment, they lost no time exploiting their newly acquired power. It was only when the Mufattish fell out of favor with Khedive Ismail that it all came out in the open, by which time the bankrupt government had been totally discredited. To save face, the Abazas were removed from office and one of them, Soliman, saw his assets temporarily seized in conformity with an interior ministry decree dated 4 November 1877.
Having failed to debase Sharkia's powerful sir-tujar in 1877 and again in 1881, Farid would not let this third opportunity pass, especially now that he had been reinstated with the khedive's personal blessing.
Alfred J. Butler, mentioned earlier, sheds new light on the soured relationship between the mudir of Sharkia and its sir-tujar.
"Provincial governors or mudirs have great power. I was shocked at this time to hear that Amin Bey Esh-Shamsi, who had entertained us so handsomely at Zagazig, had just been sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy. The fact was that he had quarreled about a piece of land with the mudir, who was Riaz Pasha's cousin."
Later in is book Butler reminds us that Riaz Pasha was chief minister.
As though imprisonment were not enough, Ahmed Farid Pasha ordered that the chained quinto-genarian sweep the main street of Zagazig. This was the town's principal boulevard running parallel to Bahr Moise (or Moussa Canal) on which stood the homes of the province's notables and senior government administrators including the large Chamsi homestead.
Although no written official evidence corroborates this story, it was said that in order to redeem the injustice done, the street Chamsi allegedly swept clean was later renamed Amin Chamsi Pasha Street.
In view of the controversies surrounding him, Amin Chamsi became a local hero acclaimed by notables and peasants alike, so that immediately following Khedive Mohammed Tewfik's death in 1892 all of Chamsi's privileges were reinstated by Tewfik's son, the anti-British Abbas Hilmi II.
But what was it that had so upset Khedive Tewfik to the point where he turned against one of the most influential figures of Sharkia?
In his book 'An Englishman's Recollection of Egypt, 1863-1887', Samuel Seligman Kusel, a British-educated Jew, recounts how he first met Amin Chamsi in 1864. Yet for unknown reasons, he fails to mention that he had actually been, along with other foreigners, employed by Chamsi to operate the latter's cotton mill. Kusel's position at the time was that of First Assistant. He would later climb Egypt's socio-political ranks acquiring lucrative employment in the Egyptian government, ultimately becoming a mid-level official in the customs department.
Notwithstanding Kusel's selective retention, he describes Amin Chamsi as "a wealthy Arab cotton merchant and a great friend of the nationalist Ahmed Orabi who started as an officer in the commissariat in the Zagazig quarter before rising to the short-lived position of Minister of War."
Before the rebellion of 1882, which ultimately led to the British military occupation of Egypt, Orabi had tried without success to pressure the khedive in introducing radical changes to his government. Basically, Orabi wanted bona fide Egyptians to assume senior government posts which were otherwise given to outsiders and foreigners, especially those from the Turco-Circassian class.
Kusel remarks that in those turbulent days Amin Chamsi was frequently seen with Orabi. "So much so that he was arrested on suspicion of having conspired against the Government, was kept in prison for some time, but finally released when he returned to Zagazig, and is I believe still living there, and is now a pasha."
In fact, Chamsi Pasha had died two years before Kusel published his recollections.
Chamsi's support for Ahmed Orabi's quest to rid Egypt from its servile Turco-Circassian oligarchs is confirmed in several other publications covering the said Revolt. For instance, in 'Egypt for the Egyptians', Dr. Alexander Scholch, describes Amin Chamsi Pasha as the leading notable of Sharkia and one of the principle supporters of the nationalist movement of 1882.
One therefore wonders why Amin Chamsi was so inspired by Orabi. Why was he backing the very man who wanted to do away with the privileged class Chamsi belonged to? Could it be that like many others, Chamsi too had been influenced by fellow freemason and political activist Gamal al-Din al-Afghani? The great Moslem thinker was often described as less interested in theology than he was in organizing a response to Western imperialism.
The nationalist Copt Salama Musa gives us a partial answer in his autobiography 'The Education of Salama Musa'.
"Amin al-Shamsi, knew our family well, for he and my father had been old friends. Whenever I passed by him sitting in front of his house he stopped me with his hand, and inquired after the health of all my family. In the period between 1890 and 1900 he was out of favour with the authorities because he had been a follower of Urabi in the revolution of the year 1882. He had taken part in that national movement against the Khedive Tawfiq although he himself was of Turkish origin."
Later on in his book Salama reiterates, "The struggle between Urabi and the Khedive was to a large extent one between the Turks and the Circassians on the side of the latter, and the Egyptians on the other; but Amin al-Shamsi had been personally convinced of the justice of the Egyptians claims and therefore joined the group of Urabi."
We know Chamsi was of varied extraction with one parent's ancestry going as back to the late 17th century Ottoman arrivals, probably from Central Asian plains or the Caucasus.
We also know another Chamsi grandparent, Ali Agha al-Anyahli hailed from somewhere between Konya and Alanya in southern Turkey, depending on how one interprets his name as it appears in various old documents.
Newly arrived in Egypt, soldier Ali Agha, sired several offspring. Whereas his daughters Fatma and Nefissa were known by their first name with the appendage "bint Ali Agha", the sons sported a different surname each. Three of them, Mustafa Amin, Mohammed Faizi and Hussein Fahmy, opted for the conventional path of risk-free careers in the civil service. All we know of the fourth son, Zulfikar Fouad, is that he died in June 1901.
Early on the three brothers realized that by affiliation to the ruler and his interests, and by serving him loyally, they would rise in rank and be rewarded with money, landed property, prestige, privileges and, perhaps, a grand funeral.
The country squire Mustafa Amin Bey died in December 1910 comfortable in the knowledge his repute remained unblemished. Senior government administrator Haj Mohammed Faizi Pasha joined him 9 months later with the anticipated sendoff duly reported in the press and a street named after him in the Osmanli par excellence suburb of Helwan.
As for Hussein Fahmy, he spent most of his working life in Upper Egypt as Inspector-General of Awqaf agricultural lands. Whereas the progeny of the first two bothers intertwined, the descendants of the third broke free. Separate books could be written about two offspring, the notorious political slayer Hussein Tewfik Ahmed (1925-1987) and the dissenting foreign minister Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel (1927-2001)--but that's another story.
Of Ali Agha's sons it was Mohammed Faizi who typified the 'new mamluk', firmly embedded with the ruling Turco-Circassian elite.
waqf dossier, Faizi Pasha (1840-1911), his Cairo townhouse, Helwan street sign,
resumè and obituary
Scouting the 1890s press one notes how the new mamluks mimicked the then-ruler Abbas Hilmi II. Summers by the shores of the Bosporus, taking the waters at Carlsbad or Vitel, commuting back and forth between Cairo and Alexandria depending where the Khedive was holding court, etc.
Among the principal court-followers we find the proud Faizi Pasha. A former Turkish-language interpreter in the ministry of interior, he rose among the ranks to become uninterruptedly the mudir of Qena in Upper Egypt, of Behera in the Delta and later of the large province of Gharbia that has the blessed city of Tantah for its capital. His devoted loyalty to the ruler would earn him in February 1893 the plum job of director general of the ministry of Awqaf, a position he held up until his mandatory retirement in September 1900. It was during his tenure that the ministry moved into its impressive neo-Islamic premises on Gamea Sharkass Street, within walking distance from Faizi's Bavarian-looking townhouse on the elegant Sheik Rihan Street.
Interestingly, Faizi's fastidious coterie included the chief minister, Riaz Pasha, and his cousin Ahmed Farid Pasha, both of them dire enemies of Faizi's estranged nephew, Amin Chamsi. Besides his many stints as mudir of Sharkia, Ahmed Farid was the sometime director of the Daira Saneya, a huge agricultural enterprise that spread across Upper Egypt and the historic oasis of Fayum where Faizi Pasha, Mustafa Amin Bey and their sister, Nefissa bint Ali Agha, owned agricultural land, as did other al-Anyahli descendants, namely the Zein al-Abdeens and Bayazids of Assiut and Beni Sueif.
Understandably, Mohammed Faizi Pasha, along with his brother-in-law Hassan Sabri Bey, reproached their 'provincial' relation for being too controversial. They were at opposite ends of the patrician spectrum, and as far as Faizi was concerned, Amin Chamsi had not only gone furiously native, but he had had the impertinence to join the 'rebels' who called for the elimination of the Turco-Circassian oligarchs! Adding insult to injury, the troublesome sir-tujar had married his three eldest daughters to minor local notables and forbade the use of the Turkish language in his household. The Orabi supporter was to be shunned at all costs!
Perhaps "furiously native" is too strong a description, for Amin Chamsi had held back on some issues. For instance, he did not wear the traditional Egyptian kaftan-galabiyah, keffiyeh and emmah but stuck to Ottoman-European dress code whereby a stamboulieh (white shirt, black vest, black trouser) and red fez were de rigueur on all occasions. As a result he stood out in the provincial town as 'al-turki' much as he stood out in the Majlis Shura where kaftans and keffiyehs were still a majority and where half the delegates were illiterate. And he was not totally anti-Ottoman for we saw how he had joined the Tewfik Fund almost as soon as it was created. And as evidenced by others, he had hosted the khedive in his Zagazig home during the latter's inspection tour.
Yet in view of his known affiliation with the mostly non-Ottoman yet affluent merchant class, Amin Chamsi was barely acknowledged by the ruling Circassian cast or his Ottoman relations for that matter. Could this be one of the reasons he had backed Orabi--out of pique? Or was he simply being a pragmatic businessman who had bet on a local dark horse from his province who could one day prove financially beneficial. Or even better, the ambitious Chamsi wanted to graduate from a provincial boss to a national chieftain!
Unlike his forebears who were on state payroll, either as officers or as members of the senior civil service, Chamsi was an entrepreneur with independent financial means. He did not work with or for the rank and file and consequently felt little or no allegiance to the Ottoman-run establishment. And since he did not report to the ruling elite, he could afford to let the side down, or so he thought.
According to Scholch, it was thanks to Chamsi that Orabi came to know the prominent landowners and merchants of Sharkia's principle towns. "Through his personal wealth and his position of sir-tujar, Chamsi was able to muster local support and raise the necessary financial backing whenever Orabi required either."
Furthermore, Scholch explains that When in 1881 Khedive Mohammed Tewfik banished Orabi for insubordination to his hometown of Hawiyet Razna, a few kilometers east of Zagazig, the latter received a rapturous welcome from his country folk headed by its merchants, notables and assemblymen. Amin Chamsi led the reception committee at the railway station and two days later gave Orabi a befitting banquet attended by 2,000 guests.
In 'Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East', Juan Ricardo Cole corroborates the above. "The support for 'Urabi of great merchants such as Hasan Musa al-'Aqqad and 'Abdu's-Salama al-Muwaylihi of Cairo, and Amin Bey Shamsi, the Sertuccar of Zaqaziq, possessed great importance. They along with the wealthier village headmen, were the most obvious source of extra funding for military and other revolutionary activities. The merchants' guilds, moreover, could be potent tools for the mobilization of an important sector of the urban populace. Theses guilds overlapped with the newer sort of organization, such as the Masonic order to which 'Abdu's-Salam al-Muwaylihi belonged."
Moreover, in 'The Orabi Revolution and The English Occupation' Abdel Rahman al-Rafei describes the festivities that took place in Sharkia starting with Amin Chamsi's luncheon at the Chamsi homestead at which time Orabi gave a rousing thank you speech followed by a passionate discourse by Abdallah Nadim.
Other lunches by Sharkia's notable followed, says al-Rafei "including that of Ahmed Abaza Bey at his farm in Sherwaida, that of the Omda of Assawgi, Sheikh Ahmed Mahgoub, and a lunch hosted by Soliman Abaza Bey and a fourth banquet offered by Soliman Abaza Pasha."
Orabi's homecoming celebrations, were of such gigantic proportions, the alarmed government of Mohammed Cherif Pasha thought better of it and recalled Orabi to Cairo offering him the portfolio of undersecretary at the ministry of war.
Thereafter, Amin Chamsi, Sharkia's delegate to the short-lived Chamber of Delegates duly inaugurated by the khedive on 26 December 1881, took a front seat watching helplessly as the situation in Egypt rapidly deteriorated.
To begin with, the khedive's declared animosity towards the Chamber provoked a chain of unfortunate events, namely the bombing of Alexandria by British Man of Wars ending with the subsequent defeat of Orabi at the battle of Tel al-Kabir in September of that year.
What had started as Orabi's call for freedom from alleged Turco-Circassian domination, ended with the introduction of almost 72 years of British military occupation. This had come to complement the foreign economic domination that had infiltrated itself into Egypt 15 years earlier following Egypt's default on it sovereign debt.
Somewhere in the narrow lapse between Orabi's failed revolt and his subsequent defeat by the British at the battle of Tel al-Kabir, Khedive Mohammed Tewfik defected to the British for protection. Similarly, he lost no time accusing his ex-minister of war and his partisans of high treason.
Sensing the mood had changed, several of Orabi's staunch supporters jumped ship. Notable among them was Mohammed Sultan Pasha who, up until the eve of the rebellion, was president of the Chamber of Deputies.
Even as Egyptian foot soldiers were dying at the battle of Tel al-Kabir, in an unparalleled effort to manifest his allegiance to the khedive, Mohammed Sultan Pasha, hosted a banquet near Ismailia in honor of General Wolsely, commander of the invading British army. Standing at the receiving line next to Sultan stood Ahmed Farid Pasha, the ex-governor of Sharkia. This would the first in a series of lavish banquets given by Sultan pasha in honor of the English patrons.
To curry favor to the new English masters, Sultan initiated a collect with which to buy a majestic gift to the conquering British general. To that end the former head lawmaker received a L.E. 10,000 pound reward from a very grateful khedive. And from Queen Victoria he received the Order of St. George and St. Michael, personally delivered by the British consul, Sir Edward Malet, on 28 November 1882. Orabi was sentenced to perpetual exile four days later.
A bitter pill to swallow for Chamsi and the Orabi nationalists!
Hard to imagine only a few months earlier, precisely on 29 December 1881, Sultan Pasha, Chamsi Bey and nine other deputies in full regalia, had personally delivered to the khedive the Chamber's reply to the Speech from the Throne.
Furthermore, that in their capacities of elected deputies Sultan Pasha and Chamsi Bey had helped draft the constitution of 1882 which had so upset France and Britain ultimately causing the resignation of Prime Minister Cherif Pasha.
That fifteen deputies with Chamsi amongst them, twice met the khedive at Abdeen Palace in January 1982, the outcome of which Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi Pasha, a renegade Circassian, was nominated to the post of prime minister with Orabi as his minister of war.
And now they were miles part: Sultan Pasha in the service of the British invader and Chamsi Bey on his way to a Cairo prison cell.
The Orabi 'revolution' had failed and the still nascent constitution was replaced by martial law. Nevertheless, Egypt had taken the first step towards parliamentary democracy, or so it seemed.
Meanwhile, Ahmed Orabi Pasha, his loyal officers and many of his more important civilian supporters were rounded up and incarcerated in the Daira Saneya prison in (what is today the western part of Attaba Square) Cairo, just two streets from the Khedival Opera House. Amin Chamsi was amongst them.
September 15 must have been a heartbreaking day for the former lawmaker from Sharkia. The following day's al-Ahram sums it up perfectly. On the right side of the front page in bold print is the khedivial decree appointing Ahmed Farid Pasha to his old post of mudir of Sharkia. In small print on the left side of the same page is the announcement of Amin Chamsi's arrest. Khedivial vengeance indeed!
The khedive was unable to forgive Chamsi for having been one of five deputies calling for his summary removal at the decisive 27 May 1882 meeting held at the Cairo residence of Sultan Pasha. Present at this landmark meeting were Orabi Pasha and his senior officers, Egypt's leading clerics as well a majority of the elected deputies.
As far as Khedive Mohammed-Tewfik was concerned, Chamsi had not only let his class down, but had also been one of five who had dared suggest to the fated attendance at Sultan Pasha's house that the time had come to remove the sitting Khedive replacing him with his uncle, Abdel Halim Pasha. The latter had been in exile in Istanbul since the days of Khedive Ismail and was considered by some the legitimate heir to the Khediviate of Egypt.
Shadowy times for Sharkia's former sir-tujar.
Amongst Chamsi's employees was a young Syrian clerk by the name of Nicola Kormi (also spelt Curmi) who claimed British citizenship through a Maltese grandfather. He was in his home in Beirut when the troubles started in Egypt. It was only when returning to Zagazig that he learned of his master's misfortune.
The Chamsi family overwhelmed with grief and besides themselves with consternation, asked Kormi to travel to Cairo on 8 November 1882 and to approach Orabi's legal defenders--the London firm of Broadley & Napier, asking that they should also taken on Amin Chamsi's defense. As it turned out this request cost Kormi his deportation; the khedive's men had tracked him down all the way from Zagazig.
From the lengthy exposé published in 1884 by Broadley & Napier, we learn that Chamsi was a freemason and that the London barristers thought highly of him. "He is a man of intelligence perfectly capable of assisting in the self-government of his country."
According to A.M. Broadley's book 'How We Defended Arabi and his Friends' we get our first inkling as to what could have triggered the alleged story of Amin Chamsi sweeping the streets of Zagazig.
"A most disagreeable incident now occurred. The mudir or governor of Zagazig was a near relative of Prime Minister Riaz Pasha. He had once previously been removed from his post, and he suspected two of the chief inhabitants of the province to have been to some degree instrumental in procuring his discomfiture. Their positions were now by a turn of fortune reversed; Ferid Pasha was once more governor [of Sharkia] and his opponents, Emin Bey Shemsi and Ahmed Bey Abaza, two strong adherents of Arabi, were in prison in Cairo."
Could such a rare opportunity for a little seasonal vengeance be possibly missed?
After Orabi's trial, Chamsi and Abaza were removed to Zagazig and given up to the tender mercies of Chamsi's enemy, Ahmed Farid Pasha. Both men were chained into a dark and bedless cell and were compelled to clean the prison. "They were and otherwise treated with inhumanity and indignity," recounts Broadley.
Another post-trial account is found in Orabi sympathizer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's book 'Gordon at Khartoum'.
On his way to India in September-October 1883, Wilfrid Blunt stopped in Egypt to get a feel for the political situation. In order to do so he visited several British administrators including Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer). Blunt's impression was that they were mostly resigned to the deplorable status quo.
Likewise, Blunt paid visits to, as he put it, "distinguished members of the Party of Liberty as the National Party is now called."
Blunt's diary entry for October 1, "The first house we called at was Emin Bey Shemsi's, late deputy for Zagazig, and chairman of a section…. Shemsi used to be a country neighbour and personal friend of Arabi's. He is a very intelligent man, and of some courage too, or he would not have received us, for he was only let out of prison a few months ago, and is still watched by spies. I asked him to tell the history of the two crises in which the Notables were concerned last year."
Another direct question put forward by Blunt dealt with the possibility of an exiled Arabi being elected president of the Chamber of Deputies.
Chamsi's tongue in cheek retort was not without personal risk in view of the precarious circumstances. "Voting [takes] place in the police station, under the superintendence of the police, and at each station there were men in plain clothes to watch the voting and direct the election on the part of the Government. A man who should have the courage to write Arabi's name on his paper would at once be hustled away, and he and his family would be ruined."
It appeared that as long as the British continued to back Khedive Tewfik's failed regime all that was left for the former sir-tujar and his fellow nationalists was to lie low and hope for a reversal of fortune.
The reversal came in small increments. Jail was exchanged for house arrest with bail set at L.E. 5000. Then came the dry years save for Chamsi re-marrying a much younger but affluent bride who gave him six new offspring.
It was a decade later that the tide turned in Chamsi's favor with the unexpected death of Khedive Mohammed Tewfik on 7 January 1892.
left: al-Ahram 19 April 1892: celebration of Firman of Khedive's investiture
right: celebrations for Khedivial train transit in Sharkia
No sooner had Abbas Hilmi II succeeded his father to the throne of Egypt when, on 31 January, His Highness was petitioned by the merchants of Sharkia via al-Ahram in its 1 February issue, to re-instate Amin Chamsi to his former positions. The gracious reply was not late in coming.
In a show of gratitude, the following April Amin Chamsi hosted a three-day celebration at his townhouse on the occasion of the proclamation of the khedive's firman of investiture. Similar manifestations of gratitude would follow throughout the coming years; Amin Chamsi believed or at least hoped, the young ruler's convictions were unlike those of his late father.
In an effort to replenish his near-empty coffers, Chamsi re-embarked on private commercial interests which meant temporarily relinquishing his posts of sir-tujar and naqeeb to the capable Hassan Eidarous Bey; at least until the latter unexpectedly passed away in 1897. In 1892-3 Amin Chamsi aggressively promoted new and used agricultural water pumps through advertisements in al-Ahram. If there was ever a time to sell mechanized agricultural equipment it was the 1890s.
Whether Chamsi liked it or not, the economic climate had considerably stabilized under the de facto British administration that followed the failed Orabi revolution. Not only had the new tax system redressed Egypt's economy but more importantly it instilled confidence with farmers and merchants alike. Likewise, relative freedom of the press introduced a system of accountability heretofore unknown. This was complemented by a robust judicial system at the Mixed Court level eventually emulated by indigenous courts.
Quick to capitalize on a rising economy, the mercantile Chamsi sought to amortize some of the more important religious events celebrated at his large Zagazig homestead. Mulid al-Nabi and the two Bairams were sure crowd-getters attracting visitors and well-wishers from all over the county and from all walks of life--cash-rich farmers, downtrodden peasants, ambitious politicians and corruptible civil servants. And as is typical in rural areas, word gets around faster than a camel turns a waterwheel. So what better timing to promote water pumps and other modern wonders then the ex-naqeeb's famed three-day Mulid al-Nabi foodfests faithfully reported in the press free of charge!
Since it would be some time before Chamsi resumed his seat in the now-toothless Majlis al-Nuwaab a.k.a. Majlis Shura Qawaneen, he made do with local politics joining the local municipal council, which by the looks of it, was a target for countless criticism in view of its ineffectiveness.
With time it looked as though Chamsi's Ottomanophobia was giving way to Ottomanomania. Was this a sign the aging rebel had given up hope of an independent Egypt? That what really happened during the last few years was simply a changing of the guard with the chauvinistic British replacing the vain Turks? And that as a result the irate Chamsi had merely transferred his repugnance from the old occupier to more recent one?
Or was old man Chamsi settling down in his old age, giving in to his much younger Turkish wife, adopting a safer go-with-the-flow policy? In any case, successive bumper crops and a rising demand for agricultural water pumps and spare parts, brought in record profits. Once again Chamsi was a very rich man and it was time to show gratitude.
According to contemporary press reports, whenever it was time to celebrate the Ottoman sultan's investiture anniversary, the Chamsi townhouse was aglow with decorative lights from top to bottom. Ditto for the khedive's birthday anniversary and other khedivial celebrations! And when, during the Crete crisis of 1896, there was a nationwide campaign to aid Ottoman troops in their fight against Greece, it was Chamsi who headed the Zagazig fundraising committee supported by his son in-law Ali Chirbini Bey and the latter's brother, Mohammed, who was now Omda of Zagazig.
Amin Chamsi was himself a generous contributor and adept at coercing others to donate, including members of his own family. As a result he was invited to join several National Fundraising Committees which brought together a select panel of wealthy luminaries. According to al-Ahram of December 1899, one such committee had for its members Mohammed Ratib Pasha, Osman Ghaleb Bey, Messrs Felix Suares and Moise Cattaui, along with Sheik Ali Youssef and, al-Khawagas Hanna Bakhoum and Habib Sakakini. Clearly Egypt's multi-ethnic spectrum had been properly covered.
One of the above committee's tasks was organizing the khedive's annual birthday celebrations in Cairo's Ezbekieh's Garden. Lacking proper headquarters, members met at the Cairo offices of Joseph Cattaui Bey (later pasha) and it would also be there that the collected proceeds were disbursed to leading Moslem, Christian and Jewish charity organizations. Soon enough committee members were recipients of decorations and titles from a grateful ruler. Yet somehow Chamsi was bypassed from every honors list.
By the looks of it, Chamsi realized he and his riches had been taken for a ride, for in 1901 he is nowhere to be seen on either fundraising committee; the one supervising the sultan's investiture anniversary, or the one organizing the khedive's birthday celebration. Instead we see him re-directing his money into local charities. The one he personally favored is the Shams Makarem al-Akhlaak al-Islamiya. Aside from helping the needy and the physically challenged, the pious foundation was Chamsi's answer to Christian charities set up in Zagazig by his rivals the Melkite Chedid Brothers who, as a result, received several Papal decorations plus the title of 'count'.
Chamsi however remained on hold for what was nicknamed the Disaster Committee which would materialize whenever circumstances required. One such occasion was the terrible fire that destroyed the Delta town of Mit Ghamr. Very quickly the nation galvanized into action and contributions poured in. To organize the collection and disbursement of funds an ad hoc interdenominational committee was straight away called into action under the auspices of the khedive and presided by Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Abdou. The usual cast were elected on the executive board: Awqaf director-general Abdel Halim Assem Pasha, Cairo sir-tujar Abdel Salaam Mouelhy Pasha, banker Moussa Cattaui Bey, Sharkia elder Amin Chamsi, industrialist Monsieur Felix Suares, Max Hertz Bey, chief engineer of the Islamic antiquities, Idris Ragheb Bey, Monsieur Cesar Adda of the Delta Railways etc.
In another striking show of philanthropic grandeur we find Chamsi spearheading the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of a mosque in memory of Ali Agha. Attending the November 1901 consecration are Zagazig's VIPs representing the temporal and Sharkia's clergy representing the divine, not forgetting her majesty the press on behalf of public opinion. Legislative elections were not far away and Chamsi had cleverly covered his bases.
In January 1902 Zagazig obediently elected its favorite son to the National Assembly--a precursor of today's parliament. The inaugural session took place on 8 March in the presence of Abbas Hilmi II. Following the customary pledge of allegiance and swearing-in ceremonies, the delegates were warmly welcomed by the khedive who pronounced a short formal speech laying out a very limited agenda.
Lacking a proper conference hall, the delegates convened in the very same chamber which had hosted the fated Majlis of 1882, when Chamsi and his colleagues had exacted substantial constitutional rights from the incumbent khedive's father. But that was water under the bridge for the constitution had been choked at birth, the chamber had been summarily dissolved and some of its members incarcerated or exiled. The democratic experiment had been a sham and the legislative body indefinitely suspended. For all intents and purposes the new National Assembly would be a pastiche of its short-lived 1982 original.
Pastiche or not, the Zagazig delegate now had a bona fide reason to stretch his stopovers in Cairo where his third wife and their six offspring permanently resided. Contrary to her rustic predecessors who came from the provinces, the young, wealthy and independently-minded Fatma Khorshed-Talaat shunned the countryside.
A genteel Ottoman Turk whose forefathers came from the province of Laz on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, Fatma Khorshed-Talaat usually had her way especially since she had brought a fat dowry consisting of vast agricultural and commercial properties in Tantah, Kafr Soliman Moussa near Zagazig, Belbeis and Cairo, all of which helped put the temporarily bankrupt sir-tujar back on his feet.
Her time and that of her children was spent mostly at the Chamsi residence in Cairo's Abdeen district which she preferred to Kasr al-Dubara where the other Chamsi townhouse was located.
If Fatma Hanum claimed Kasr al-Dubara was too affrangi for her taste, the real reason for discarding this secondary residence was that the house was within sight of Villa Selim Chedid (today the US Embassy). If having to tolerate the Chedid brothers in Zagazig was force majeure, Amin Chamsi was not about to re-live that experience in Cairo. The villa was henceforth leased to an English civil servant.
A city girl at heart, Chamsi Pasha Hanum liked to be near the shops, the expanding boulevards, the Gezira promenade and the famed Cairo Opera House. And although not on first name basis with her two noble neighbors on Sheik Abdallah Street, the princesses Saneya Mustafa Fadel and Mohammed Orfi Pasha, Fatma Hanum was nevertheless content their respective eunuchs and kalfas had befriended her own, an excellent way to keep abreast of palace gossip. Also nearby were the homes of her two brothers and their chatty wives, Conjugul and Shemsfelek.
And whenever Fatma Hanum tired of Abdeen there was the Chamsi garden villa in Helwan which was only 45 minutes away via the Bab al-Louk - Helwan Express. What a pleasure the small township was en saison with its chic thermal spa, curative clinics and its quaint teatro. In fact, it was during an outing in Helwan that one of her nosy eunuchs suffered a cerebral hemorrhage dying instantly. Hardly a newsworthy story but nevertheless duly reported in al-Ahram of 27 February 1905, as though to indicate some women were too liberal!
Fatma Khorshed died in Cairo at the young age of 45. Her imposing funeral took off from Sheikh Abdallah Street on 13 June 1909, at 16:00 heading towards the marble-lined Khorshed-Talaat mausoleum on Imam al-Shafei Street, near the mosque by the same name. She was laid to rest next to her Laz relations and as was the custom then, she was surrounded by departed family retainers including eunuchs, lalas and kalfas sporting unpronounceable names.
Yet all the years Fatma Khorshed had held court in Cairo, Zagazig kept calling its favorite son back. In January 1904 Sharkia's perennial delegate to the National Assembly was re-elected once more to the town's municipal council which then comprised four councilmen. But no sooner had Chamsi called for a reunion that he felt obliged to tender his resignation. The 4th councilman, Abdel Aziz Chirbini, had been disqualified for failing to meet the required criteria. Since it was known he was a Chamsi crony, the only honorable thing was for the patron to bow out, much to the disappointment of the mudir who looked at him for support in certain local matters.
There would be other opportunities yet for the shy-less 71 year old man. When in 1905 the Zagazig town-council transformed itself into a municipality with eight elected members, 4 Egyptian and 4 Greeks, it was Chamsi who headed it in terms of seniority. He would retain his seat therein until he died.
But even before masterminding his multiple comebacks, Chamsi had become a red-carpet habitué. When Mustafa Fahmy Pasha, the most Ottoman of Egyptian prime ministers, called on Zagazig in April 1898, it was Chamsi who led the welcome committee. Likewise, when in October of that year the khedive paid a two-day official visit to Sharkia, Amin Chamsi was first among equals at the receiving line wearing his four hats: naqeeb, ex-merchant provost, wealthy entrepreneur and dean of town elders.
As it turned out on that particular occasion the khedive's entourage included Awqaf Director-General Mohammed Faizi Pasha, so that for almost 48 hours, the alienated Faizi-Chamsi relatives found themselves either side by side or face to face. First, in the khedivial train bringing Abbas Hilmi II to Zagazig, and later at the two official banquets attended by fifty-two privileged guests. The occasion had thus presented itself to patch up family squabbles. So much for the turnaround!
Older and less impulsive, Chamsi Pasha received in 1903 the distinguished Ottoman Order of the Osmanieh followed with an upgrade to Mirmiran. Aside from their honorific value the above decorations were a feeble reminder that despite Britain's military occupation of Egypt, the country was still regarded a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. Yet to any keen observer, it was no secret that ties between Cairo and Constantinople were weakening by the day as Britain consolidated its veiled protectorate over Egypt.
To the contemporary observer it was clear as daylight that Chamsi resented Britain's presence in Egypt, so much so that when the Prince of Wales made a whistle stop in Zagazig in 1906, Sharkia's acclaimed elder was the only one absent from the red carpet. Chamsi belonged to that group of freemason theorists who perceived modern Egypt as a company. The managers running the day to day affairs were British. The shareholders and directors were Greeks, Levantines and Jews. The un-syndicated laborers were the 12 million Egyptians, mostly illiterate. As for the self-important Circassian surplus from Khedive Ismail's era, they were either put out to grass or had become props in a dusty wax museum. For all their overbearing pomposity and arrogance, they paled against the British when it came to duplicity, racism and hypocrisy.
In 1908 Chamsi received the Order of the Mejidieh Second Class. To the ordinary layman it looked like the pasha was being rewarded for good behavior--yesteryear's firebrand content in his role of Zagazig elder, appearing in official events as part of the decor. But for those in the know Chamsi had become an icon in high places for his steadfast stand against Egypt's new masters, especially after the reprehensible Denshawai episode of 1906 of which so much has been written about.
In his book 'The Suez Canal' Sir Arnold T. Wilson recounts how, at a special February 1910 General Assembly session called to discuss the renewal of the Suez Canal concession, Amin Chamsi Pasha, in the presence of Khedive Abbas Hilmi, voiced grave concerns.
"On the 10th of February the debate was resumed by Amin El Shamsy Pasha, who commenced to speak on lines unfavorable to the Agreement. He was, however, cut short and a committee was appointed to consider the documents laid before them by the Khedive."
According to contemporary press editorials, Chamsi Pasha's statement on the matter was overlooked. His voice and those of his colleagues had thus been hushed leaving the way open for the concession renewal. The collateral damage manifested itself 10 days later with the assassination of Egypt's chief minister, Boutros Ghali Pasha; a terrible price to pay for rallying with the British. None had forgotten it was Ghali who had passed sentence at the dishonorable Denshawai trial when seven Egyptian peasants were hanged for having practiced their right of self-defense against three errant British soldiers.
Ghali's assassination set off a chain of events one of them being the landmark Coptic Conference organized in February 1911 under the leadership of the Bishop of Assiut advocating Coptic rights.
The above conference in turn provoked a three-day Moslem National Congress which was opened by former chief minister Mustafa Riaz Pasha on April 29. Held next to the Heliopolis Luna Park, the congress brought together leading figures in all fields to discuss a wide range of issues besides sectarianism. These included education, women's rights, economy and health.
As far as the Chamsis were concerned, the congress had joined father and son in their call for progress. On the one hand, an eager European-educated Ali Chamsi, 26, read out a paper highlighting the importance of introducing scientific education in colleges with special emphasis on agriculture, industry and commerce. On the other, Amin Chamsi Pasha, now 78, called for the establishment of a national bank with Egyptian capital. More importantly, he demanded that farmers unions' be introduced throughout the nation, a call that would be echoed later on with revolutionary repercussions.
In some way the above conference had highlighted the changing of the Chamsi guard.
When Amin Chamsi Pasha died in September 1913 at age 80, his eulogy read like a litany of historic and personal events: sir-tujar bandar Zagazig; member of the Legislative Council and several of its committees; participated in Orabi's failed nationalist revolt; political internee; succumbed to court disgrace; overcame bankruptcies; engineered his political comeback; resumed public office; gave generously to charity; fathered eleven; mourned two wives and widowed a third.
The controversial Amin Chamsi Pasha had lived long enough to watch Zagazig evolve from a dusty one-street hamlet to a fully grown city of 35,000 now sporting 22 main streets one of them bearing his name. He had mid-wifed the birth of its municipality becoming a founding member. He watched the arrival of the Suares narrow-gauge light railway crisscrossing the eastern Delta linking Zagazig to Mansurah, Zefta and other regional towns. Later he celebrated the introduction of the Egyptian State Railway when its Cairo line ended at Zagazig long before its subsequent extension to Port Saiid and Suez. Much later, in 1900, came that other communication wonder, the telephone. Chamsi's number was 36, one digit ahead of Selim de Chedid!
Zagazig now enjoyed 10 Greek-run cafe-bars and nine decent hotels, one of which financed by Chamsi and operated by his wakil Kazem Irani, the local carpet merchant. There were a number of banks including a branch of the new National Bank of Egypt. Zagazig also boasted several foreign consulates including the one that had Amin Chamsi's eldest son for vice-consul. And for the ladies, there was a branch of the famous Orosdi-Back department store which would soon rename itself Omer-Effendi.
And to attest to Zagazig being a pivotal produce center, cotton giants Carver Bros, Choremi, Benachi and Planta had all set up offices on Chamsi Street. Moreover, the former sir-tujar had pushed for and eventually welcomed the establishment in Zagazig of a Court of First Instance serving the entire mudirieh. Along with other Zagazig grandees Chamsi had taken part in so many inaugurals he could only retain a few, namely the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the central post-office, the government hospital, the state-run primary school and the African Missionary Nuns' Girl School. Conversely, Chamsi recalled he did not attend the 1903 official blessing of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) launched by the Chedid brothers.
Over the last decades Chamsi had welcomed and bid farewell to over 30 mudirs; powerful pashas and sensible beys among them, some he missed and others he preferred to forget. Likewise, he watched with bemusement as his three Sharkia-based sons in-law advanced from small-time rural squires into important district bosses, with his help naturally. All three had been decorated and two duly elected to regional councils. They had become newsmakers in their own right.
Zagazig and its surroundings had come a very long way during Chamsi's watch.
But there was the downside to longevity as well. Born in a key region of a once proud Moslem empire, the ex-naqeeb lived out its agonizing decline and the subsequent takeover of its far-flung parts by descendants of the Crusaders no less.
Indeed, Chamsi had been a first-hand spectator of Egypt's defeat by British soldiers a few kilometers east of his hometown, followed by the precipitated entrance of an imperialist pro-consul who would rule Egypt with an iron fist for the next 24 years. Once in control, Cromer made sure his cronies infiltrated the civil service taking over most senior and middle-level positions. "Even Zagazig has become a British halfway station!" ranted old man Chamsi to whoever listened. "And while the Khedive runs around in circles his make-believe government is no more in control than a drunken lion-trainer in a gilded cage."
For the frustrated partisan who wanted to 'contain' the ruling Ottoman oligarchy in 1892 it must have been doubly ironic that just when he was about to depart this world, the British and their Levantine proxies had all but displaced the original patrons of Zagazig and the other towns. Chamsi knew this more than anyone else since his own bankruptcy had spelt the good fortune of the brothers Riskallah and Selim Chedid, Sharkia's much feted new dignitaries.
Had Chamsi lived another year, the veteran nationalist from Sharkia would have witnessed the start of WW1 and Britain's unilateral declaration on 20 December 1914 of its protectorate over Egypt.
Perhaps, it was just as well that Chamsi died when he did.
Four sons, seven daughters and their countless offspring survived Amin Chamsi Pasha. Not surprising since he married three times so that his eldest daughter was the same age if not older than his third wife.
From his first wife who seemingly died young, Chamsi had a son, Mohammed, and a daughter, Aziza, who died childless in July 1927 survived by her husband Abdel Samad Amer, the son of an important local notable--Omda.
It was therefore through his three daughters from his second wife, Besmellah (1845-1915) that the Chamsi name merged with three of Sharkia's other leading clans: the Chirbinis, Alfys and Mareis.
The story of Amin Chamsi's second wife is somewhat fuzzy. According to family narrative, Besmellah's father hailed from the Aegean province of Morea. As was common in early 19th century warfare the conqueror made off with gold, women, livestock and whatever else they could drag or carry. Hence, Mohammed Ali's invading army in Greece brought back countless children as slaves or child labor. This was the case of Besmellah's father Soliman al-Moraly (the Morean) and her aunt Salounis who were forcibly removed from their Greek father, allegedly a lay member of the church.
Brought up as Moslems, these booty-children were groomed for household, army and civil service duties depending on their gender and capabilities. It is not clear where Soliman ended up but as an adult he took on a slave-bride from whom he begot two daughters, Besmellah and Khadiga, and a son, Ahmed Helmi. Whilst Besmellah wed Amin Chamsi, rich at the time, Khadiga married the son of a Circassian soldier with whom she had several children including famous poet-chronicler Ahmed Omar Zulfikar al-Kashef (1878-1948).
The eldest of Amin Chamsi and Besmellah's three daughters was named Arifa in honor of the only mother Amin Chamsi had known. Orphaned at a very young age he was raised by Arifa Khatoun his ultimate benefactress. The younger Arifa married Ahmed al-Alfy a scion of Minia al-Qamh's Alfy clan. As omda of the Delta town of Senahwa, he was one of Sharkia's more important elders. Unfortunately for him, his Chamsi wife gave him only two daughters, one of whom died in February 1892. The other, Baheya, lived long enough to marry her first cousin Mahmoud al-Alfy with whom she had half a dozen offspring making up for her mother's childbearing limitations.
Nabawia married Ali al-Chirbini Bey (d.1914) a wealthy notable who besides being or town chief of the rural town of Bahnabay, was consul of Persia in the town of Zagazig. From him Nabawia delivered five offspring of which the only daughter, Amina, married into the important Fakhredine-Abaza clan.
Zeinab, Besmellah's youngest married Hussein Marei Nasr Bey, the omda of Azizia. From this union came a progeny of Mareis.
All three marriages were mentioned in the Cairo press. For instance al-Ahram of 1895 (reprinted in al-Ahram 22 February 1996, page 7), announces that "in Zagazig Amin Chamsi Bey, a leading merchant, celebrates the wedding of his daughter to a local notable. In attendance were the Abaza family and other province elders. Large tables laden with dishes were in evidence and meat was distributed amongst the poor. From Cairo, Amin Chamsi sent for singer Mohammed Effendi Osman and the famous lady singer Al-Hagga al-Swissia both of whom sang well past midnight."
In his book 'Family, Power and Politics in Egypt', Robert Springborg explains how marrying into the Chamsi family was synonymous to social improvement and upward mobility for local squires or omdas seeking to upgrade their status.
Springborg focuses in particular on the rise to power during the Nasser era of one of the above-mentioned families with particular emphasis on a former speaker of parliament, Sayed Ahmed Marei (1913-1993) who married his cousin Soad Marei, a great granddaughter of Amin Chamsi Pasha.
On the other hand, Amin Chamsis three daughters from his third wife were betrothed to urbane university graduates from outside Sharkia. This break with convention was due to their mother's influence.
Although Fatma Khorshed died young, she laid in peace knowing she had married off her two eldest daughters to city folks. Amina, the eldest, married an army MD Hassan Raafat Effendi (elevated to Pasha in June 1923). He served in the Egyptian army in the province of Sudan, rising from within the army ranks to the grade of general and later obtaining the position of chief medical officer of King Fouad's royal guards. He was also the King's representative to several international medical congresses. Amina and her husband lived in Garden City where they raised a son and two daughters.
Neamat, the second daughter, had married a French-educated Turco-Circassian notable. Hers was the only divorce in the Chamsi family, brought on when her husband, Mohammed Sirry Bey, walked out of the house leaving behind an infant son and daughter. He would later marry his French mistress. As tradition required, the abandoned Neamat lived with one of her brothers who had set up house in Cairo. She died in May 1930 young and heartbroken.
Dawlet, the youngest daughter, married her father's cousin in 1914. The British-educated Abbas Baligh Sabry, Dawlet and their five offspring would henceforth lead a regimented life in Cairo's ultra-colonial suburb of Maadi. In the morning Sabry Bey checked in at the ministry of awqaf where his uncle, Mohammed Faizi (al-Anyahli) Pasha, had once been director-general. In the evening he played bridge at the Maadi Sporting Club winning numerous tournaments. To their credit Sabry Bey and Dawlet Hanem raised four athletic sons and a strong -minded daughter. One of the sons would unwittingly influence Egypt's destiny.
When he writes about Amin Chamsi and his extended influence through marital alliances and social network, Springborg does not tell us that none of the sir-tujar's seven daughters had a say in whom she married. As was current at the time, daughters were regarded as a commodity. Their first duty was to keep the bloodline going and the second was to expand family and dynastic influence especially now that legislative voting had been introduced in the political psyche. Except for his youngest, all of Chamsi's daughters were child brides and any notion of marrying out of love was pure fiction as Amina Chamsi bitterly found out after developing a teenage crush on a maternal cousin. Summarily overruled she was forcibly betrothed to a never-seen-before doctor for whom respect and companionship only came with the passage of time.
Of Chamsi's seven daughters only the youngest made it to the Saneya Preparatory Girls School launched by women rights advocate Kassem Amin. The others had to make do with private lessons at home and these were limited to basic reading and writing. Like his peers, Amin Chamsi truly believed in the French dictum nul ne peu aimer une femme savante.
Mohammed Chamsi named Russian consul in 1902;
below: what remained of the cotton ginning mill and oil-producing factory in 1990
what remained of the Amin Chamsi School on Amin Chamsi Street (1990)
the Zagazig Chamsi homestead in shambles in 1990
back view of the Kafr Soliman Moussa farmhouse in 1990
The two youngest, Mustafa and Abdel Halim were named after maternal uncles. Ali on the other hand was probably named after Ali Agha 'al-Anyahli '. As for the eldest, Mohammed, he was named after Sir-wan Mohammed Chamsi who was himself named after the Prophet, a traditional way of giving thanks to the Almighty.
Even though he had studied law, Mohammed Chamsi was a country fellow at heart unmoved by city life and indifferent to politics. He spent most of his life in Sharkia living in the shadow of the awesome man. Officially, his professional life was shared between his roles as Czarist Russia's honorary consul in Zagazig and omda of Kafr Soliman Moussa, a small hamlet outside Zagazig acquired by the Chamsis. Unofficially, he enjoyed the pleasures of being the bachelor legatee of a rich man so that every now and then we find Mohammed Chamsi's name on the Lloyd Trieste passenger list traveling from Port Saiid to Venice or Marseille during the pre-WW1 years.
But with time his responsibilities diminished rather than expanded. These were limited to running the dwindling family holdings which he managed (or mismanaged) for account of his aging father and later on behalf his absentee siblings. He also administered the waqf his father had drawn up on 12 December 1911 that very quickly found itself the subject of a protracted legal battle with the Chedid family. As for the mysterious Arapoğlu Waqf entrusted to his father by its originator, it remains a puzzle to this date, its secret lingering in the inaccessible dungeons of the ministry of awqaf.
Mohammed Chamsi was also trustee of the much older 1812 Waqf set up by ancestral Chamsis making sure resultant funds were properly disbursed. Likewise he had the unenviable task of liquidating what was left of the Chamsi factories of which some physical remnants were still evident in 1988 facing Amin Chamsi Pasha Street (now, Gamal Abdel Nasser Avenue). Meanwhile the site of the cotton ginning plant which had once produced oil seed, soap and flour had become a secondary school.
The exemplary Chamsi landholdings which had won so many prizes at the annual agricultural fairs had greatly shrunken even before the old man had passed away. For one thing, disastrous speculation in the 1905-6 cotton exchange spelt financial misfortune for Amin Chamsi when some of his agricultural land ended up in the hands of Chedid brothers. The Syrian vultures, as Chamsi was prone to describe his insufferable rivals, had purchased part of the loan he had contracted with the Egyptian Land Bank. When Chamsi failed to settle on time, the Chedids took over a sizeable chunk of the 1,271 feddans at Banayos and Kafr Nahaal that had been used as security against the LE 85,000 loan.
Relative newcomers to Sharkia, the Chedids and their in-laws the Mekalefs, had gained considerable terrain in the 1890s from Chamsi and others like him who saw their fortunes rise and fall with each political and economic variation.
The Chamsi ginning factory plus some 700 feddans meanwhile were sold to Senator Abdel Aziz Radwan Bey (later pasha) and others. Formerly an employee at Chamsi's factory, Radwan took great pride of his modest origins and the fact he had studied at madrasset al-zamaan wa al-tajarob a public elementary school. He later became one of Zagazig's most successful cotton brokers and president of its chamber of commerce. A convivial man and a brilliant orator, he befriended several of Chamsi's progeny including Ali and Abdel Halim Chamsi, and Amin Hussein Marei, all three fellow parliamentarians.
Besides caretaking what was left of Amin Chamsi's assets, Mohammed Chamsi Bey continued to serve as Russia's consular agent in Sharkia. He was the only Moslem to occupy such a post; for an unspecified reason, the honorary representatives of Christian powers were either Levantine or Copts. The justification for the many foreign consulates in the provinces lies in that the Delta towns of Zagazig and Mansurah, like Assiut and Minia in Upper Egypt, were important produce-gathering centers with thriving foreign communities, many of them associated with the profitable cotton trade.
But with the Czarist Russian consulate gone in 1920 following the Bolshevik revolution, coupled with the steady thinning of Chamsi commercial interests in Sharkia, Mohammed Chamsi Bey found some consolation supervising charity associations as would have been expected from a former naqeeb al-Ashraaf in Zagazig.
It was Chamsi Pasha's second son, Ali (1885-1962), who entered politics taking over where his father had left off. If Amin Chamsi had been a big fish in a small pond, his second born son was about to swim with the sharks in the high seas.
Of his youth we don't know much. However if we are to believe a Zagazig childhood contemporary, Ali Chamsi appeared to have shown leadership qualities in his preteens.
"The days of my youth were full of the exploits of my brother, who was my senior by four years," recounts Salama Musa in his autobiography 'The Education of Salama Musa'. "I really looked up to him as a hero, because of the dangerous things he dared to do. Among his feats I remember that he founded a boys' club, to which I also belonged. A similar club had been founded by Ali Shamsi (later pasha), and one day that group came upon us when we were alone, giving us a thorough flogging because of some squabble that had risen between Ali Shamsi and my brother. Shortly after that we lured him away to a deserted road north of Zagazig and pounded him with sticks and stones so that he went home with great pain."
So much for Ali Chamsi's youthful exploits and subsequent punishment!
As a university student and later during his post graduate studies at Geneva and Lyon Universities, Ali Chamsi was an active member of the Youth Committee, which held its first Egyptian Conference in 1908 in Geneva. Attended by members of the British House of Commons and by deputies of the French Chamber, the conference publicized to the world at large that Egypt had a right to independence and self-determination.
Ali spent the years leading up to WW1 at 13 Rue General Dufour, Geneva. During the war, he was a long term guest at Geneva's Hotel d'Angleterre, spending intermittent periods in the small resort of Brunig, a mountain pass located forty kilometers southwest of Lucerne.
Like many of his generation, Ali Chamsi was an ardent supporter of the Egyptian nationalist movement. He lent support to such leaders as Mohammed Farid, president of the anti-British al Watan (National) Party founded by the orator-publicist Mustafa Kamel. Never mind that Farid was the son of Governor Ahmed Ferid, Amin Chamsi Pasha's sworn enemy of over thirty years. Nationalist politics and the struggle for an independent Egypt took precedence over personal vendettas and settlement of old accounts. In any case Ahmed Farid Pasha had died in Cairo on 11 March 1901 and, understandably, Amin Chamsi had not attended his funeral!
As expected under the quasi feudal circumstances, Ali Chamsi was elected to the Legislative Council, a position that for almost two decades had been intermittently occupied by his father. But unfortunately for him and his colleagues, representative legislature in Egypt all but ended when, on 20 December 1914, Britain formalized its protectorate over Egypt breaking all ties with the pro-German Ottoman Empire.
By the same token, the British government removed the Germanophile Khedive Abbas Hilmi II from Egypt's throne, replacing him with his more accommodating uncle, Sultan Hussein Kamel.
Heeding advice from Cairo and to avoid certain incarceration at home, Ali Chamsi remained in Europe for the next seven years.
The British 'Residence' in Cairo's Kasr al-Dubara which, for several decades was the real seat of power in Egypt, was clamping down on nationalists, especially those known to have rallied around the ex-khedive. Earmarked was Ali Chamsi who had been one of the first nationalists to travel to Istanbul evidencing his support for the deposed Egyptian ruler. It was, after all, Abbas Hilmi II who had reinstated Amin Chamsi Pasha.
Reports received by British officials in Cairo claimed that certain expatriate Egyptians were plotting a coup with the hope of establishing a free and independent Egypt headed by the former khedive and a constitutional government. To that end Egyptian students abroad had organized themselves into various organizations. It was no secret that for a time, Ali Chamsi had belonged to the Permanent Committee of the Egyptian Youth in Europe, headquartered in Geneva.
In 'The Memoirs and Diaries of Muhamed Farid an Egyptian Nationalist Leader 1868-1919' we learn how Ali Chamsi, Mohammed Farid, and other exiled nationalists, met and discussed means of ridding Egypt from its British occupiers. We also learn of the several meetings that took place between Chamsi, Farid and the ex-khedive during the latter's travels across Europe.
Somehow, Ali Chamsi and his friends thought they could influence the course of history from their nerve centers in Paris, Lucerne, or the alpine resort of Brunig. These illusions dissipated and dissent and mistrust arose within the ranks of the Egyptian Diaspora as they became increasingly disillusioned with the intriguing ex-khedive. And if during the early war years Ali Chamsi had kept close contact with Abbas Hilmi II, towards its end he developed a closer understanding with the ex-Khedive's brother, Prince Mohammed-Ali Tewfik.
Disappointed with the way events were going, in 1919 Ali Chamsi and his Egyptian associates in Geneva formed the Comité Egyptienne which produced a pamphlet "l'Egypte et le Congres de la Paix" explaining the history of the Egyptian Question and its quest for independence from Britain. Distributed in Geneva and Lyons, the pamphlet was also sent it to the members of the Paris Conference in an attempt to sway public opinion.
Earlier, Ali Chamsi had written a separate 30-page booklet entitled 'Egypt and the Rights of Nations: An Egyptian Opinion' in which he subtly advocated an agreement with the British that would make Egypt, like Canada or Australia, a colony with full internal autonomy. In his closing chapter, he wrote that if the ties binding Canada and Australia to the mother country were not accepted by those dominions, they would not have helped England in the war.
In the same booklet, Chamsi does not specifically advocate granting dominion status to Egypt. He nevertheless allows for foreign control over Egypt's public debt provided it did not infringe on its privileges. He also expresses the hope that 'a true friendship develop' between England and Egypt. Chamsi sent a copy of his booklet to Lord Balfour (1848-1930) on 5 February 1918, signing his name in the English tradition sacrificing the "I" for a "Y" and an "S" instead of "C".
Ali Chamsi's desire to befriend England was not well received. Foreign Office reports dated 1916 describe him with a certain degree of wariness. Furthermore, from his summer residence in Ramleh, Alexandria, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry MacMahon, wrote on 23 August 1916, that Chamsi was "a virulent nationalist." And that "there should be no negotiations whatsoever with partisans."
Likewise, Ali Chamsi was equally unpopular with the Ottoman government for having been a member of Egypt's independence-seeking Legislative Council.
When WW1 came to an end, Egypt expected to have its say at the Versailles Peace Conference. To that purpose a wafd--delegation, comprising senior statesmen was in the process of formation only to discover Egypt was not on the list of invitees. Britain regarded Egypt's status as that of a private dominion or crown colony and although its ruler sported the title of sultan, he was actually perceived as the equivalent of a complying local governor.
As a result of the above political and diplomatic omission, popular agitation erupted spontaneously across the country forcing the British to reluctantly accept that a downsized delegation travel to London to discuss the termination of the protectorate. Ali Chamsi was a member of this delegation. Henceforth, a nationalist coalition political party was formed under the name "Wafd".
Overnight, the Wafd became Egypt's most popular party and remained so for the coming three decades.
Yet, the birth of this new party had its share of labor pains. To begin with the downsized delegation failed to achieve its objectives at the London meeting. Then came the deportation of its charismatic leader Saad Zaghloul Pasha (1854-1927) and a number of his close followers successively to Gibraltar, Aden and the Seychelles. The remaining supporters in Egypt were outlawed.
On his part Ali Chamsi remained in voluntary exile in Europe thus avoiding a similar fate.
Chamsi's eventual return to Egypt in February 1922 was acclaimed in both the Arabic-language press as well as the pro-British English-language media.
"Among the keen Nationalists who have spent the last few years out if Egypt is Ali Chamsi Bey, member of the Legislative Council, who arrived at Alexandria last Monday afternoon on SS Helouan. He had an enthusiastic reception, a deputation from the Wafd and others from the Sharkia Province and from Tantah having gone to Alexandria especially to meet him. "
Soon after, the Alexandria students gave a tea in Chamsi's honor at the Majestic Hotel. "[Afterwards] a student named Abdul Hamid Eff. Khalaf, proposed that the ceremony should be suspended for five minutes as a mark of protest against the deportation of Saad Zaghloul and his five colleagues." Poignant words printed in the Egyptian Gazette on 8 February 1922.
cabinet of Adly Yeken Pasha at celebration (Chamsi Pasha in red circle)
with cabinet of Mustafa Nahas Pasha
Ali Chamsi Pasha (2nd form left) + King Fouad in 1927
Eventually, the Wafd won the day and took over power in Egypt. Saad Zaghloul Pasha, who had been allowed to return from exile, won a landslide victory much to the horror of the British high commissioner and H.M. Fouad, the sultan-turned-king of Egypt.
On 27 January 1924, Saad Zaghloul formed the first Wafd government making him the first prime minister under Egypt's new constitution. In March of the same year, Ali Chamsi was one of four MP's elected to the post of parliamentary secretary. The others were Wafdists Ahmed Khashaba Bey, William Makram Ebeid Bey and Mohammed Tewfik Khalil.
In John Murray's 'Independent Egypt', court politician Amine Youssef recollects that when Zaghloul submitted his list of ten prospective cabinet members, two of them, Morcos Hanna and Ali Chamsi, were out-rightly rejected by King Fouad.
Hanna, who at the time was president of the lawyers syndicate, was rejected "because he was a Copt and a Christian ought not to be a minister of justice in a Mohammedan country" where the Shari'a, or Islamic Law, had such a preponderant role.
Ali Chamsi Bey was discarded on the grounds that he had been a supporter of the ex-Khedive. It greatly annoyed the incumbent king that his nephew, Abbas Hilmi II, was alive and could, at any time, create problems by laying claim to the throne of Egypt.
But Ali Chamsi's time would come. Meanwhile more entanglements were waiting for him, the most serious happening one week after his attending the official opening of King Tut Ank-amon’s sarcophagus in Luxor's Valley of the Kings, giving credence, some said, to the myth of Pharaoh's curse.
On the morning of Wednesday 19 November 1924, a Royal Decree appointed Ali Chamsi the new minister of finance. Zaghloul Pasha was at the height of his power and the Wafd continued to flex its muscles.
But just as the congratulatory messages arrived at the council of ministers, an unexpected event would plunge the prime minister, his cabinet, the Wafd Party, and especially Ali Chamsi along with the rest of Egypt, into the gravest political crisis of the decade.
A little after 1:30 p.m. of the same day, Sir Lee Stack, the sir-dar and British commander of the Egyptian army, was shot and wounded as he drove from the ministry of war to the sir-daria, his official home in Zamalek (today the Officer's Club on 26th of July Street). The perpetrators, anti-British nationalists, escaped in a waiting taxi. Stack died the following day at the Anglo-American Hospital.
This was a disaster for Zaghloul Pasha. On the afternoon of 22 November 1924, immediately after the state funeral, British High Commissioner Field Marshal Viscount Allenby left the British Residence in Kasr al-Dubara (now, British Embassy) surrounded by a cavalry escort from the 16th/15th Lancers, and proceeded to the prime minister's office.
Dispensing with diplomatic niceties, Allenby straight away delivered, in English, his landmark ultimatum to Zaghloul Pasha whereby Egypt was ordered to present ample apology for the crime.
The ultimatum also requested that an open inquiry against all would-be collaborators in the crime should take place immediately. It forbade and suppressed all popular political demonstrations, demanded the withdrawal within 24 hours of all Egyptian officers from the Sudan (still an Egyptian province,) and the payment of a LE 500,000 indemnity (blood money) to the British government.
Failing immediate compliance with its demands, Britain would take appropriate action to safeguard its interests in Egypt and the Sudan.
Political translation: Britain will apply military might if Zaghloul does not resign forthwith.
Not waiting for any reply, Allenby embarked on a show of force. For starters, an armored train was sent through the Delta towns escorted by a squadron of airplanes. In Alexandria, marines from the British battleships anchored in the harbor, Accompanied by British infantry from nearby camps, marched through the city while British marines were posted at the gates of the Alexandria Customs House.
His back to the wall, Saad Zaghloul Pasha reluctantly complied with the British ultimatum. The entire cabinet resigned but before doing so, Ali Chamsi in his capacity of Egypt's minister of finance, signed the L.E. 500,000 (blood money) check.
Unknown to Chamsi, the amount had originally been requested in sterling pounds thus a foreign exchange difference was duly returned to the Egyptian government. The cursed transaction would eventually go down in history as the Chamsi Check!
Ironically, Ali Chamsi's sole administrative act during his five-day tenure at finance had been to sign the ignominious indemnity check. His father, Amin Chamsi Pasha had just turned in his grave.
The story circulating at the time in England and Egypt was that anyone present at the unveiling of the young pharaoh's tomb would be cursed. Hadn't Lord Carnavaron died of a mosquito bite shortly after attending the fated event! Yet, according to a 5 December 1926 entry in Howard Carter's diary, an un-frazzled Ali Chamsi re-visited King Tut's tomb but this time as minister of public instruction (education). Luckily for him he had become immune to the so-called curse.
In June 1926, Ali Chamsi Bey MP, the three-term delegate of his constituency of Qenayat, Sharkia, returned to the cabinet: this time with the portfolio of education a post he occupied again in the governments of Adly Yeken, Abdel-Khalek Sarwat and Mustafa Nahas Pashas.
Understandably, Ali Chamsi never made it back to finance for none had forgotten his ill-fated November 1924 five-day tenure culminated with his signing the infamous Chamsi Check. Moreover, Adly Yeken Pasha, the sensible prime minister who replaced Zaghloul, had adopted a conciliatory stance towards the British heading off any clash that could guarantee him a fate similar to his predecessor.
In 'Egypt Since Cromer,' Lord Lloyd, Britain's high commissioner and one of its greatest colonialist, had these unsavory words regarding some members of Adly Yeken's cabinet:
"The remainder of the Cabinet were Zaghlul's men with definite extremist tendencies, but they were not men of outstanding ability, and their attitude would depend upon that of the leader of their party. Nor did they have charge of Departments in which they could work a great deal of mischief: only Ali Shemsi Bey at the Ministry of Education had a promising field for the creation of trouble, and for the present he was showing a tendency to swim with the tide of moderation."
A moderate he was, for Ali Chamsi had had enough of Zaghloul's firebrand politics and its disastrous results of which he had been a direct victim. Moreover, working with the new prime minister was a pleasure. Adly Yeken Pasha knew the Chamsi family personally having been the longest serving mudir of Sharkia, from 1897 until March 1901, when Amin Chamsi Pasha was still very much in evidence and when Ali was barely a teenager. The friendship had been further cemented when more than once Adly Yegen and Amin Chamsi found themselves traveling to or from Europe aboard the same passenger ship, first class of-course!
In March 1927, Ali Chamsi's name featured on the king's Birthday Honors. Like his father he was elevated to the rank of pasha. Although many more tributes were in the mill, several would never materialize. Such was the case when he was recommended for the post of prime minister.
Besides re-organizing the ministry from ground level upwards and weeding out the corrupt elements, some of the highlights of Chamsi's tenure as minister of education was the laying the foundation stone on 7 February 1928 of the new Fouad University campus (today Cairo University), the opening on 11 April 1928 of Ewart Hall at the American University and the inauguration of several schools across the nation including first-time education centers in the Western Desert oases. To his credit Chamsi was a staunch supporter for the promotion of fine arts at all levels of higher education which heretofore had been thoroughly neglected.
Adly Yeken’s government resigned in June 1928 following a crisis with the British government over the Capitulations issue. Ali Chamsi, co-founder of the Wafd party was out of a job.
The Wafd meanwhile was ailing. Dissent within the Party rank and file had begun even before Saad Zaghloul Pasha died unexpectedly in August 1927.
Unable to cope with an un-pragmatic Mustafa Nahas who had succeeded Zaghloul, Ali Chamsi left the Party along with seven other senior colleagues, an occurrence which earned the dissenters the designation of "the seven and a half." The press which had coined the humorous description was actually referring to Chamsi's small size hence the "half". In fact, Ali Chamsi would often make fun of his small size to his nephews claiming he often had to purchase his clothes in the childrens' department.
What he lacked in size, Ali Chamsi more than made up in stature. Putting Party differences aside, when the childless Mother of the Nation (Safeya Zaghloul Hanem) died in January 1946, it was Ali Chamsi Pasha, together with Prime Minister Mahmoud Nokrashy Pasha and Egypt's Coptic ex-foreign minister, Wassef Ghali Pasha, who received the condolences at her state funeral. They were there on behalf of the Wafd Party's founding members and the incumbent members could do nothing about it!
With the creation of a constitutional monarchy in Egypt in 1923, legislative elections and party politics increasingly seduced the landed gentry so that absentee landlords were becoming the rule, not the exception.
While Egypt's foreign and defense policies remained in the hands of Whitehall, its banking, commercial and business activities were controlled by a powerful foreign contingent whose composition was mostly Euro-Judeo-Levantine. The latter skillfully served their own interests alongside those of the larger community and were catalytic to the development of Egypt's economy and infrastructure. As we shall see, Ali Chamsi had ties with all three: party politics, foreign policy and the Egypt's rising taipans.
Ali Chamsi's ties to party politics were more than evident during the government crisis of 1929.
In a confidential telegram to London on 6 December, Sir Percy Lorraine, the British high commissioner to Egypt, reports that he had met King Fouad that day. As though probing for advice, the king had asked the high commissioner what his position would be if the Wafdists were divided in their selection of the new prime minister. Without hesitating, Lorraine responded that he would suggest Mustafa Nahas Pasha as long as he had the support of the majority.
Resuming the issue at a later stage in the conversation, the king asked sir Percy what the case would be if Nahas declined the position for political party considerations. Would sir Lorraine then approve of Ali Chamsi Pasha?
Lorraine relates in his aide memoirs that he responded in the affirmative. Evidently, the animosity King Fouad harbored towards Ali Chamsi had subsided to the extent that he preferred to have him as his chief minister than the rambunctious Nahas Pasha.
As history shows, the King's suggested appointee never made it to head of government for Nahas readily welcomed his own appointment to the post with the blessings of the British. As though in compensation, Ali Chamsi Pasha was recommended for an ambassadorship to Paris, an offer he refused forthwith preferring to remain close to the power center.
Nevertheless a career in diplomacy awaited Ali Chamsi MP in the not too distant future, but in the interim there were domestic matters to attend to and a family business to run with the assistance of his three brothers.
Until he died September 1934, Mohammed Chamsi Bey continued to look after family interests in Sharkia so the services of his younger brother, Ali Chamsi Pasha, were not needed for the time being.
Mustafa Chamsi, the black sheep of the family, had devoted his life to pleasure, leisure and liquor. Politics and business were not his game. He died prematurely in 1936 when hit by a passing motorcycle on Malika Nazli Street (now, Ramses Street), then one of Cairo's busiest thoroughfares.
Ali Chamsi Pasha therefore turned his attention to his youngest brother Abdel Halim (1892-1964).
As a Wafdist and later as an independent, Abdel Halim Chamsi Bey intermittently represented the constituency of Qenayat, Sharkia in parliament, ensuring that the Chamsi stronghold remained within the family. In post-monarchy Egypt this same constituency would be represented in parliament by his nephew, Ali Baligh Sabry.
Abdel Halim's moment of glory came with his wining a crucial bi-election on 8 December 1924 when at the age of 32 he beat his formidable opponent Osman Abaza Pasha in the latter's own constituency of Minia al-Qamh, Sharkia.
As reported then in Le Petit Parisien and London's Daily Herald Abdel Halim Chamsi's victory had less to do with his name and much to do with his riding a winning ticket--the popular Wafd party, and the Abaza clan's failure to endorse its leader Saad Zaghloul Pasha time and time again which cost them many a ballot vote.
Aside from being a member of parliament, one could say that Abdel Halim Chamsi's unusual claim to fame was when one summer day in June 1929, a devoted supporter from Sharkia, Ali Ismail Shabana, named his newborn son Abdel Halim in honor of his Chamsi benefactor. Years later, the Sharkia boy became the Arab world's uncontested heartthrob and crooner, Abdel Halim Hafez (d.1977).
With his brothers occupied in various ways perhaps it was time for Ali Chamsi Pasha to think of other domestic issues.
During his school years in Switzerland and later during his eight-year exile by the Lac Leman, Geneva, Ali Chamsi developed an affinity for the small landlocked confederation. And even before St. Moritz and Pontresina became fashionable resorts, Chamsi summered there each year returning in winter during ski season. One can also say his love for the Helvetic Confederation also extended to one of its women.
On 21 August 1928, Ali Chamsi Pasha married Helene, the daughter of Professor Burnet of the University of Geneva. Best men at the wedding were Mohammed Fahmy Bey and Murad Sidahmed Bey a sometime cabinet minister and Egypt's representative to Italy who died on 15 February 1947, in a mysterious air crash off the coast of Terracina whilst en route from Rome to Cairo aboard a special military flight (Savoia-Marchetti aircraft).
Unlike most of his conservative peers who were inclined to entertain at the Mohammed Ali Club or the Semiramis without their wives, Mr. and Mrs. Ali Chamsi Pasha's combined guest list included the top European elite as well as leading international financiers, many of whom were pivotal to Egypt's industrial development.
And when they were not entertaining at Cairo's leading hotels, the Chamsis received their international guests in their smart villa fronting Ramses Street, Heliopolis, an occurrence rarely seen in the adjacent villas occupied respectively by Wafd elders and sometime prime ministers, Mahmoud Nokrashy and Mustafa Nahas.
In more ways than one the Cairo Chamsis had successfully made the transition from rural squires to cultured urban society. As though to prove this point Ali Chamsi subscribed to several of Cairo's cosmopolitan organizations: Friends of the Arts, the French Friendship Association (le Groupement des Amities Francaise) of which he was honorary president are two good examples.
Ali Chamsi was also on the board of the prestigious Mohammed Ali Club, Cairo's answer to London's Athenaeum. And naturally he was a catalyst for cultural rapprochement between Egypt and Switzerland, especially the French speaking-part.
In return for Chamsi's fidelity to francophonie, contemporary French statesmen saw in him a staunch ally. French envoy Henri Gaillard states that Chamsi "est bien dispose a notre egard" (27 March 1928), while Comte Jacques d'Aumale considered him "l'homme politique le plus intelligent et le plus sense de l'opposition wafdiste" (9 August 1928), and Kaddour ben Ghabrit summed it up in one sentence "C'est un homme remarquablement intelligent, de culture francaise."
Over the years, Chamsi's emotional ties to Switzerland gave way to important business transactions with that country. Yet, national duty always seemed to take precedence whenever necessary.
In 1936, Ali Chamsi, both as a veteran politician and as the representative of the splinter National Front Group, which had broken off from the Wafd Party the previous decade, took part in the lengthy negotiations that culminated in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty signed in London in 1936.
The following year, Chamsi participated in the crucial Montreux Conference, which finally put an end to the regime of Capitulations (foreign concessions) in Egypt. His on the termination of Capitulations in Egypt had been consistent. In an interview on the subject he states that:
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special postage stamp commemorating Anglo-Egyptian Treaty ending regime of Capitulations in Egypt. Ali Chamsi Pasha among those featured on face of stamp
Egyptian delegation at League of Nations May 1937: Seated from L-R: Ali Chamsi Pasha, Foreign Minister Wassef Ghali Pasha, Prime Minister Mustafa Nahas Pasha and Wafd Party elder Makram-Ebeid Pasha.
Standing L-R: Unknown, Mohammed Salah El Din Pasha (2nd Secretary at Egyptian Mission to League of Nations and later Foreign Minister), George Dumani (1st Secretary at Egyptian Mission to League of Nations), Leon Dichy, unknown
Egypt was the last state to join the League of Nations before its demise
On 26 May 1937, the day after the signing of the Montreux Convention, Chamsi Pasha accompanied Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahas to the Geneva headquarters of the League of Nations. Therein Nahas addressed the extraordinary session for the first time. Egypt now a sovereign nation, free from extra-territorial concessions, became a full fledged member of the League.
Since Ali Chamsi Pasha had been instrumental in enhancing diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Egypt, it was no accident when he returned to Geneva in August as Egypt's first Permanent Representative to the League of Nations.
An independently minded person often in disagreement with his colleagues in government, the disillusioned Chamsi resigned his senior diplomatic post a few months before WW2 put an end to the already crippled organization.
His League of Nations experience left Chamsi wary of multilateral mediation and diplomacy. A decade later, in a conversation with Iraq's prime minister, Mohammed Jamali, Chamsi characteristically differed with most Egyptian politicians when he described the nascent League of Arab Nations as having "excessive ambition among states that are neither close to each other or homogeneous in mentality and culture." In fact Chamsi's views on pan-Arabism did not differ much from that of his former mentor, the fiery nationalist Saad Zaghloul.
Never one to hide his thoughts Zaghloul regarded multi-ethnic Egypt as a separate and higher entity than its Moslem 'Arab' neighbors. At odds with pan-Arab advocate Abdel Rahman Azzam, Zaghloul is said to have qualified an Arab federation project as a non-starter. Nevertheless, two decades later, Azzam Pasha would become the Arab League's first secretary general. At the time, Ali Chamsi believed the Arab League should deal only with matters on which all can agree and leave serious problems to be handled by the Arab states concerned. As for the new League's secretary general, Chamsi candidly remarked to Jamali that "he produced too many statements."
When he returned to Egypt aboard the S.S. Marco Polo in October 1939, Ali Chamsi Pasha did not realize he would be separated from his beloved Geneva for the next five years. With the outbreak of WW2, Egypt was suddenly the center of attention on the military and diplomatic fronts. Party politics were rampant once again and governments were constantly changing. Early on Chamsi realized he could do more for Egypt through commercial and financial involvement than by pursuing partisan politics. Having chosen this course of action he did very well for himself assuming several working (as opposed to ornamental) directorships in leading companies. These included the Suez Canal Company, the National Bank of Egypt, the Portland Cement Company, the Cairo Water Company etc.
In view of his Swiss connections Chamsi Pasha sat on the board of almost all the Swiss and Egypto-Swiss concerns operating in Egypt including those belonging to the Schmidheiny Group which had introduced cement factories into Egypt and the Middle East
Another important directorship was a seat on al-Ahram's board, still controlled by its founders the Takla family. This is how an ambitious rookie reporter called Hassanein Heikal got his first shot at Egypt's leading Arabic-language newspaper, when unknowing of its grave consequences Chamsi Pasha recommended him for the job.
Of humble origins with an insatiable crave to be on the inside, this particular hired pen knew where and when to place his bets. This became evident when Heikal cleverly solicited the patronage of a rising Nasser who later appointed him head of al-Ahram after it had been sequestered from its Syrian owners. Turning on his many benefactors Heikal would later turn on Chamsi Pasha's nephews, one at a time.
Meanwhile, Ali Chamsi's business interests never deterred him from delivering critical reprimands in parliament, many of them making headlines for their outspokenness. In a highly publicized speech in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1939, he warned that "Population growth has outstripped economic production". This was one of the earliest public warnings on record that Egypt was about to face a population problem. (Egypt at the time was a creditor nation with a population of less than 20 million.)
Ali Chamsi's list of suggested remedies for the improvement of its economic production covered agrarian and social reforms. Perhaps if heeded at the time, they would have been of paramount long-term value perhaps even pre-empting the 1952 coup that toppled Egypt's constitutional monarchy.
Unfortunately, WW2 took precedence over Chamsi Pasha's economic reforms and moreover Egypt's short-lived wartime boom clouded the issues at hand. The small farmer and the needy entrepreneur would wait another decade before their plight was brought to national attention, this time from alien quarters and with devastating results from which the economy would never recover.
In the meantime, on 24 October 1940, the unthinkable happened. The predominantly British board of the National Bank of Egypt elected Ali Chamsi Pasha its first Egyptian chairman. The man who as Minister of Finance in 1924, had been forced to sign the "Chamsi Check" under pressures from Lord Allenby, was now at the head of the last bastion of British economic interests in Egypt.
Divine retribution!
The National Bank was founded on 26 June 1898, by a consortium headed by Messrs Sir Ernest Cassel (London), Raphael Suares (Cairo) and Constantine Salvagos (Alexandria). Its first governor was Sir Elwin Palmer, the former financial advisor to the Egyptian government. For the next 63 years, the NBE undertook the banking business of the Egyptian government. It had the exclusive right to issue Egyptian banknote until 1961 when the present Central Bank of Egypt was created.
Because the former one-day Minister of Finance reported to an international board of directors instead of a governmental panel of regulators, he did not have to curry favor to changing governments nor did he have to adhere to party politics and palace polemics. This was the one of the most enviable position in the city.
But was Ali Chamsi Pasha a capable banker or was his forte limited to policy-making and administration?
Economist-historian Charles Issawi, who apprenticed at the bank, had this to say: "While at the bank I also served for two years as secretary to the Governor and attended board meetings, thus becoming acquainted with Egypt's financial elite. They were not inspiring, except for the President, Ali Shamsi pasha, a cultivated and enlightened man, to whom I privately referred as le roi soleil." (Paths to the Middle East, State University of New York Press.)
A glorious tribute coming from an imminent monetary eminence who visibly did not lack a sense of humor referring to the bank President as 'Sun-God', an obvious play on the word 'shamsi' which means sun in Arabic.
A British government report highlights Chamsi as a nationalist first, a businessman second, and a banker third.
"Aly Shamsi is a businessman and politician; he is, in addition to his post as President of the National Bank, the Egyptian Representative on the Suez Canal Co. He is considered as an elder statesman and is reported to be intensely nationalistic."
Further on the same report implies the heretofore independent and private National Bank of Egypt was toeing the line of the Ministry of Finance. "The Egyptian Government has contemplated the establishment of a new central bank to replace the present National bank of Egypt or to nationalize this privately owned bank. These covert threats have made the National bank of Egypt cooperative with the finance Ministry and apparently the finance Ministry no longer has any difficulty in enforcing its policies of control."
Notwithstanding the report, the National Bank of Egypt continued to be an independent entity. Furthermore, each March, following its annual General Assembly, the National Bank's Annual Review, dubbed Ali Chamsi Pasha's Review because of its critical effect on foreign trade, capital markets, interest rates, economic social reforms etc., received intensive press coverage. On that occasion the daily al-Ahram and the rest of the printed media treated Chamsi's Review as though it were a "state of the economy address." NBE remained the nexus of economic power up until its nationalization by the Revolutionary Command Council - RCC on 9 February 1960.
In March 1953, Ali Chamsi delivered the Bank's 53rd Annual Report. As usual, it was carried in its entirety in the press. One of the changes which featured on this particular report was the appellation "Maitre" which replaced "Pasha" next to Ali Chamsi's name.
With the abolishment the previous year of all Ottoman-style titles and ranks: Pasha, Bey, Effendi, Hanem, Sahebat al-Essma etc., a substitute title was found for Chamsi and his distinguished colleagues.
"Maitre" which denotes someone in the legal profession, was the alternative under the new circumstances brought about by the July 1952 military coup which ended King Farouk's reign.
Truth be told, Chamsi was never a fan of King Farouk whom he criticized publicly and privately. "Il est paye pour cela!" was his repeated reply to those who absolved the king his youthful faux pas. Chamsi's unsympathetic argument was that King Farouk received a hefty allowance from the state coffers in order to fulfill his duties and obligations and unlike ordinary mortals he had little margin for error.
Maitre Ali Chamsi delivered two more state of the economy addresses before stepping down in 1955, at age 70, from the Bank's chief executive position. But instead of a fitting farewell ceremony, Ali Chamsi's competence as head of the National Bank was brusquely challenged by one of the Free Officers. During an unsavory confrontation at NBE's headquarters Captain Gamal Salem claimed Chamsi's Swiss diplomas were questionable and that he had been undeserving of the post!
The following year, Chamsi lost his lucrative and prestigious directorship at the Suez Canal Company.
Only a month before Nasser's epic 26 July 1956 speech in Alexandria announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Ali Chamsi had put forward a proposal to the Company's board headquarters in Paris for an equitable share transfer of the Suez Canal stock to the Government of Egypt. The proposal was mooted by the European shareholders. They had another course of action in mind. This was made apparent in October that year when France and Britain with the collusion of Israel occupied Sinai and the Suez Canal towns. Henceforth this planned military offensive would be known in history books as the Tripartite Aggression.
Ali Chamsi passed away in February 1962, six months after Egypt's entire economy was nationalized. He had lived long enough to witness the government takeover of the vital industrial, banking, and commercial sectors he had helped build. Ironically, it was one of his own nephews, Ali Baligh Sabry, the future Prime Minister of Egypt, who co-sponsored and later announced these unsavory measures to the nation on 21 July 1961.
The zealous nephew was either unaware or preferred to ignore recommendations given by Ali Chamsi from as early as August 1941. In a pre-1952 interview to al-Balagh, re-printed in all the major dailies, Chamsi recommended three decisive measures to relieve the Egyptian peasant from his daily plight. He also underlined the overwhelming presence of foreign-owned and joint venture companies in Egypt.
"These companies have rendered an invaluable service to the nation. I can therefore appreciate their presence today. Nevertheless, I hope, in the years that follow, to see their Egyptianization. But this should never occur either through violent measures or by drastic takeovers. Only when the time is right, will it be appropriate to buy these companies through share transfers or stock purchase."
Words of wisdom yet unheeded by a nephew with a mind of his own. Undoubtedly cabinet minister Ali Sabry must have been slightly vexed to say the least that his highly respected uncle disagreed with his and his colleagues' anti-capitalist policies.
Ever since the Free Officer's takeover and many times since, Ali Chamsi had not minced his words. A telltale report confirming the above was prepared by the US State Department on 17 June 1953. It spells out Chamsi's opinion of the Free Officers in the following terms:
[Ref. 774.521/6-1753, desp. 2782, CBD-ALI AL SHAMSI, Chairman of board of NBE, born Zagazig, Sharkiya, 1885, prominent landowning family. Trained in political economy in Switzerland. Supported the nationalist movement. Ran as a Wafdist. Elected as chairman of NBE in 1940. Holds outer directorship. Reported to have played a role in reconciliation of Wafd and King.]
"As a businessman, Shamsi is not enthusiastic about the new order in Egypt. In a recent conversation with an Embassy officer he stated that he was depressed by the narrow vision shown by the members of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), and that, although in his talks with them he had endeavored to emphasize that they need not be afraid of the civilian reaction to their policies, unfortunately fear and ignorance were reflected in what he described as their narrow xenophobic appeals to popular emotion. He went on to say that he found them lacking in statesmanship and that, although individually they seem to be intelligent and amenable to reason, he suspected that in their joint meetings they were swayed by the usual popular emotions. He added, however, that he could see no alternative to the present regime which would not be against everybody's interest."
Ali Chamsi's funeral was one of the biggest of its day. The members of the ancien regime had come to pay their respects, as did many of Chamsi's ex-employees and former members of the now outlawed Wafd Party. This was an exceptional occurrence since it had now become customary to purposefully scorn, shun and ignore members of the old guard. And since one of Chamsi's nephews, Ali Sabry, a grandson of Amin Chamsi Pasha, was a rising star in Nasser's Egypt, this was one of the rare occasions when the old and new regimes came reluctantly face to face.
By the time the Millennium ended, only three of Ali Chamsi's 24 nephews and nieces were still alive--and barely. As for his sixty-odd grand-nephews and nieces, now in their late 50s and above, all they had were distant memories of the Chamsi patriarch, notably his afternoon visits to their respective parents' villas and apartments in Zamalek, Maadi, Giza or Heliopolis, when he arrived in his chauffeur-driven car, both he and his driver wearing a tarboush, and armed with boxes of chocolates and dried fruits from Groppi's.
From among his many descendants only a handful can recall Ali Chamsi's grand villa on Ramses Street, Heliopolis, and the auction that took place therein after his death symbolizing the dissolution of a clan that had, for over two centuries, impacted on Egypt's political scene.
February 1965: the revolutionaries: Sabry and Nasser with Che Guevara during his second visit to Egypt
A few months after Ali Chamsi's death, one of his youngest nephews, Ali Sabry, became Prime Minister. Had he lived a few years longer Chamsi would have seen drastic political and economic policy shifts.
For instance it was under Sabry's administration that Egypt sped towards socialism, which despite favorable short term results, would ultimately have dire consequences on the overall economy. It was during his watch that a wholesale regime of sequestration was put into effect doing away with capitalists and entrepreneurs, both Egyptian and foreign. And it was also during his time in office that an irrevocable brain-drain began so that Egypt lost those who could have effectively met the demands of the new age.
Many of those affected by the above changes had one question in mind. What made this man tick?
But as far as Ali Sabry was concerned he was there to serve the people. He was not there to wait on the elite.
Himself, a product of the elite, Amin Chamsi Pasha's grandson was basically a secular, western-educated man brought up in the neo-colonial English suburb of Maadi which was also the elected place of residence of many Americans working in Egypt.
But growing up in a pseudo-foreign enclave also had its downside. One thing for sure, Ali Sabry deeply resented that Egyptians were second fiddle both in his home town and more importantly in the Sporting Club where he spent his entire teen years.
He probably also resented that his father whom he looked up to, spent time with the British residents of Maadi. As far as the rebellious adolescent was concerned the ingilizi was an arrogant exploiter who behind his cordial facade looked down on everyone else.
In 'Qira'a Fi Awraq Ali Sabri' we get an insight into Sabry's philosophy. The book is a compilation of letters Sabry wrote to his wife, Faika Thabet, and his two sons, Fouad and Tarek, from Turah Prison located two kilometers south of Maadi.
For example in his pre-teen years Sabry recalls how he realized he lived in an unreal rarefied foreign world "when a short walk from my family's beautiful garden villa in Maadi took me across the railway tracks to where Khabiri village was located and where poverty and pitiable living conditions were all over the place."
His frustrations extended to his formative years. "At my French-language school run by foreign Jesuit priests, current education did not concern itself with Egypt's plight, it was as though we were inconsequential."
In the same book Sabry highlights an incident that had a lasting effect on his psyche.
"Accompanying my father on one of his summer agricultural inspection tours we visited a cotton plantation in the Delta to check on the rampant cotton worm situation. After our tour we were invited to a lavish lunch in the beautiful home of the plantation's Greek owner. Somewhere in the conversation our host put down the Egyptian peasant saying that the cotton worm outbreak was the result the fallah's endemic laziness and that he had to be whipped in order to work!"
More disappointment to come during Sabry's one year at Fouad al-Awal University's law school. "To my dismay students and faculty were more concerned with party politics than Egypt's need to rid itself from the real problems facing us." By problems Sabry meant colonialism and a drastic imperfections regarding distribution of wealth.
Invariably Sabry would carry his flawed convictions against the khawaga and Egypt's party politics beyond his short military career.
Some time after graduating from the Royal Egyptian Air Force Academy, Sabry became head of its intelligence division. Because of his language skills and covert connections with the American Embassy he was selected by his fellow Free Officers to inform the American military attache that King Farouk had been toppled and replaced by a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC).
A couple of years later he was sent to the United States on a thankless mission. Essentially he would have to convince Eisenhower's administration to sell arms to Egypt. Further humiliation when the Americans turned him down flat. His grudge against the Anglo-Saxons rapidly extended across the Atlantic.
A decade later the State Department in Washington would characterize Sabry as Moscow's man on the basis he had developed such good ties with the Kremlin.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Henceforth Ali Sabry became a frequent flyer on the Cairo-Moscow run earning him the nickname 'Alouchka' within his own family. If fifty years separated Ali Sabri from his uncle Mohammed Chamsi Bey, it was as though the former Czarist Vice Consul in Sharkia had been replaced by a latter day Soviet Commissar in Cairo.
Head of government from 29 September 1962 until 3 October 1965, Ali Sabry personally took charge of Egypt's first Five-Year plan. To his credit it was a one-time success. Sabry had done his homework inspired by visits to India, China and Yugoslavia.
Nasser later appointed Sabry head of the all-powerful Arab Socialist Union (ASU), an organization, which in typical Soviet fashion progressively infiltrated Egypt's entire civil service apparatus and public institutions.
In view of his hold over the ASU apparatus many regarded Sabry as the most powerful man in Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser. Whereas the post of Vice President was purely ceremonial--a post he held under Gamal Abdel Nasser and again during Anwar al-Sadat's first year in office, it was as ASU chairman that Ali Sabry carried clout, so much so that political pundits gambled on his being Egypt's next president.
Following Nasser's unexpected death in September 1970 the newly nominated president Anwar al-Sadat and the all-powerful Socialist Union boss Ali Sabry lost no time drawing the lines that separated them. Thereon it was a battle of the wills between the street savvy ibn al-balad--country boy versus the dogmatic autocrat from the ibn al-zawaat suburbs. Two conflicting mentalities that differed like day and night
During the short power struggle that followed, dogma lost out to street-smart... Maadi was routed by Mit Abul Qom. In May 1971, an unnerved President Sadat ordered his rival's incarceration. A mock trial condemned Sabry to death on charges of high treason. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Ali Sabry was released in 1981, one year before Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists and by which time an impoverished Egypt initiated its long and messy divorce from the socialism Sabry had ascetically introduced in 1961.
When Sabry died of cancer of the lungs in August 1991, he was given a state sendoff with Air Force brass band and all. Yet, either because it was the middle of summer or because not too many people sympathized with the former party boss and his defunct polices, the event was a far cry from Ali Chamsi's massive funeral. Except for a few cronies and former toadies, no one of consequence had come to say good-bye.
1947: In Lake Success, NY, USA, members of the General Assembly's Legal Committee display the proposed flag for the United Nations. From left to right: Andrew Cordier, (Executive Assistant to the Secretary-General), Sir Hartley Shawcross, (United Kingdom), Faris Bey El-Khouri, (Syria), Dr Wahid Raafat, (Egypt), and Dr Ivan Kerno, (Assistant Secretary-General).
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Another one of Amin Chamsi Pasha's grandsons, Dr. Wahid Raafat, also did time in jail courtesy of the Revolutionary Command Council.
Upon graduating with honors from Law School, the only son of Amina Chamsi and Hassan Raafat Pasha traveled on state scholarship to France where he obtained his post graduate degrees from Paris University. Back in Egypt he taught law at Fouad al-Awal University (now, Cairo University) before becoming legal counsel to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As such he played an important role in Egypt's joining the UN attending several of its inaugural sessions.
An eminent constitutional jurist and political pundit, he refused to play ball with the Free Officers preferring to open what became a thriving legal practice on Cairo's Cherif Street.
The contention between him and the new leaders centered over prickly constitutional issues. But more importantly, Dr. Raafat had written a series of articles in 1957 criticizing Nasser's foreign policy warning that a rapprochement with the Soviet Union would be harmful to Egypt's interests. Moreover, he persisted in publicly defining the 23-26 July 1952 events as a "military coup" never once calling it a "people's 'revolution" which not surprisingly irked the Fee Officers.
Dr. Raafat's outspokenness was badly received in high places setting off a chain of events.
First it was the midnight knock by Nasser's security men followed by a senseless interrogation followed by imprisonment on trumped up charges of high treason.
Dr. Raafat spent the next five weeks in solitary confinement in Mohammed Ali's Citadel that had recently been turned into a political jail.
Next came the years of house arrest and his stripping of his civil rights. No unannounced visitors, no travels, no work, no right to vote etc.
A lonely voice of reason had been silenced. The reign of terror had begun.
Al-Rais' Gamal Abdel Nasser's spite against Dr. Raafat went even further. When the time came to fill a position made vacant by the death of one of the judges (Badawy Pasha from Egypt) at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Egypt was the only Arab state to reject Dr. Raafat's otherwise unanimous nomination. The position went instead to Fouad Amoun, a capable Lebanese jurist.
al-Ahram October 1957: Nasser's regime claims Aboul Fath brothers attempt to topple Nasser's regime; Wahid Raafat arrested by Nasser's Security Agents
below: Al-Mussawar Magazine cover (April 1986) featuring Wahid Raafat receiving 'recognition award' from President Mubarak
Denied his civil rights and unable to find appropriate work in Egypt, Dr. Raafat was reluctantly allowed to travel one-way to a youthful Arabian Gulf where in 1964 he took on the position of legal advisor to the Emir of Kuwait.
Dr. Raafat's relations with the nascent Gulf countries were much appreciated so that ten years later he was asked to draft a permanent constitution for the United Arab Emirates having already participated in the drafting of the temporary one still in use to this day.
On the other hand in Egypt it would take years and with abundant hindsight that Dr. Raafat's various stands were extolled in various political biographies dealing with the 1952 'revolution'.
In his memoir entitled 'I was President of Egypt', General Mohammed Naguib, Egypt's first post-monarchy president, unabashedly and repeatedly hails Dr. Raafat for his bold and often solitary stands.
"Had Dr. Raafat's legal tenets been heeded in the early days of our revolution, Egypt would have avoided the sequential chain of blunders that ostensibly lead to long term disaster."
Without mincing words President Mohammed Naguib states that the politically inexperienced Revolutionary Command Council preferred to give ear instead to self-interested power-hungry elements and to compulsive snivelers all of whom were only too eager to render themselves serviceable to the new regime.
"They were therefore disposed to telling us anything we wanted to hear."
What President Naguib and Dr. Raafat ignored at the time, that it was thanks to the malice of one of these sycophants that Dr. Raafat was spared the distasteful task of drafting King Farouk's letter of abdication.
"Wahid Raafat is too unmanageable" had been the reply given to Prime Minister Ali Maher when he remarked on July 24 that only Abdel Hamid Badawy Pasha and Dr. Wahid Raafat had the constitutional expertise to prepare such a document. Instead, King Farouk's abdication letter was hastily prepared by an accommodating lawmaker who at a later date fell out of favor with his newly found masters.
Somewhere else in his memoirs President Mohammed Naguib laments that he did not take up the proposal by one of his advisers [RCC member Youssef Seddik] calling for "the detainment of the Revolutionary Command Council using force if necessary replacing them by a civilian coalition government headed by Dr. Raafat thus averting what he saw "as the coming of a catastrophe."
President Naguib's hesitation was his undoing. Within weeks he was forcibly removed by his military subordinates and placed under house arrest for most of his remaining years. His adviser Youssef Seddik meanwhile, was imprisoned for 13 months.
The Revolutionary Command Council had started to devour its own to make way for the totalitarian military era that ensued. The Egyptian constitution that had been so arduously defended by Dr. Raafat was suspended indefinitely.
During the 1970s, when President Anwar al-Sadat re-introduced the party system in Egypt, Wahid Raafat, by now a septuagenarian, was elected Vice President of the New Wafd Party.
The Neo-Wafd, a sort of rebirth of the old nationalist party formed by Saad Zaghloul Pasha and his colleagues in 1920, immediately became the government's leading opposition. But unlike the old Wafd that had formed so many governments, its latter day facsimile would never have a chance. The regime was not about to relinquish let alone share its hold on power.
Despite Dr. Raafat's anti-regime stands, at his death in May 1987, he was recipient of a spectacular bipartisan sendoff. Notwithstanding the large attendance by the Wafd Party that turned up at the funeral, the state apparatus was also there represented by the Speaker of the House and the entire cabinet. On more than one occasion, President Hosni Mubarak had publicly and privately acknowledged Dr. Raafat's unconditional services to the nation last of which had been his conclusive role in the still on-going international Taba arbitration between Egypt and Israel. In appreciation the nation had come to pay its respects.
A few months after Dr. Raafat's death, the arbitration panel in Geneva ruled in Egypt's favor so that what still remained of Sinai under Israeli occupation was duly returned to Egyptian sovereignty.
The Chamsi name became extinct when Abdel Halim Chamsi, the last male member of the clan died in Cairo in February 1964. Although Amin Chamsi's progeny from his seven daughters are numberless, the Chamsi legend vanished with the expiration of almost all of his surviving grandchildren.
Today, Amin Chamsi Pasha's offspring no longer know one another. Unlike the first three recorded generations that produced leading statesmen and politicians, none of the sir-tujar's progeny are politically active today. This despite the fact that the youngest son of President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a daughter of President Anwar al-Sadat are themselves wedded to descendants of Amin Chamsi Pasha.
In keeping with the age of infitah, or privatization, mercantilism supplanted nationalism.
Amin Chamsi Pasha's massive marble tomb stands neglected and forgotten in his hometown of Zagazig. The old caretaker who stands guard can't remember when it was last visited. Its owner belongs to a forgotten generation.
© Copyright Samir Raafat
- E-mail writer at: swr@tedata.net.eg
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