Egyptian Revolution - July 23, 1952

The Egyptian Revolution took place on this day in 1952.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July twenty
three today. In nineteen fifty two, a revolution began in Egypt,
and we got to back up a little bit before
we get to the revolution part. Britain occupied Egypt in
the late eighteenth century and that continued all the way
until World War One. When that war was over, Egypt

(00:24):
declared its independence on February nine. The resulting Kingdom of
Egypt was, at least in theory, a constitutional monarchy. Even
though men had the right to vote and half of
the Senate were elected positions, the general population did not
have a lot of voice in the government. Really, there
were three powers that were all struggling for dominance. There

(00:46):
was the British, who still had a huge presence in Egypt.
There was the monarchy, and there was the WAFT, which
is a political party that for a time was really
the only national political party in Egypt. The war power
declined after World War Two, and other political parties rose up,
a lot of them pushing to really remove the British

(01:09):
influence completely from Egypt. They wanted an end to British
presence in neighboring countries as well. By the late nineteen forties,
there was a lot of unrest with opposition to the
monarchy and to British involvement in Egypt, coming from all
over the political spectrum. So regardless of what people's other
political views were, where they fell in all kinds of issues,

(01:33):
really a lot of them were united in the idea
that the British needed to go within the military tensions
started to rise after Egypt's defeat in the Arab Israeli War.
They felt like the king had really abandoned them during
all of this, so Colonel Gamal abdel Nasser established the
Free Officers Movement in ninety nine. The purpose of the

(01:56):
Free Officers Movement was to try to overthrow the monarchy
and its connections with the British Empire. One of its
more prominent figures was General Muhammad Nageeb. They took down
the government in a coup. The coup this episode is
about on July twenty, nineteen fifty two. They forced the king,
King Feruke, to abdicate and to leave the country, and

(02:17):
the king did this. He abdicated in favor of his son,
who was at the time only seven months old. At
least in name, his son reigned as the king of
Egypt in the Studan until the monarchy was abolished in
nineteen fifty three. This coup played out over only nine
and a half hours, and afterward Nagib named himself Commander
in chief of the Egyptian Army. So an odd thing

(02:39):
about this coup. A lot of times when you hear
about overthrowing governments, the people doing the overthrowing have a
very clear sense of what the government should be like
after that happens, and that wasn't so much the case here.
The free officers didn't have a specific plan of what
they wanted the government of Egypt to be like after
this coup. They were just motivated by a very more
general sense of Egyptian nationalism. They did, though, start trying

(03:03):
to make some changes. There were a lot of reforms
they tried to put into place. Some of these were successful.
They did install a more democratic government. There were land reforms,
including redistributing land from the wealthy to poorer people. There
were new educational opportunities, especially for impoverished children. There were
advances and voting rights, including for women, and an anti

(03:26):
corruption campaign that was successful in some ways and not others.
But at the same time there's some debate about whether
it's better to call this whole thing a revolution or
a coupe, especially since so many of the Egyptian leaders
that followed this event were all members of the military
and part of the Free Officers movement. This was the

(03:48):
first of many military coups in the Arab world. Though
it had a huge effect not only on the nation
of Egypt, but on the rest of the Middle East
as well, and this was especially true as Nasser, who
was appointed the first president end of Egypt in nineteen
fifty four, advocated for Arab unity and for independence from
the other colonized nations in the Arab world. Nasa, by

(04:10):
the way, was the first native Egyptian to rule the
country in well over two thousand years when he was appointed.
When Nasa died of a heart attack in nineteen seventy,
his funeral drew at least five million attendees, making it
one of the largest gatherings in human history. And of course,
this was not remotely the end of revolution or of

(04:30):
unrest in Egypt that has had a whole history in
the roughly half a century since this time. But today
Revolution Day is a public holiday in Egypt commemorating this
event thanks to Christopher Hasiotis and his research on today's episode,
and for Tari Harrison, who edits all of these episodes.
You can subscribe to This Day in History class on

(04:52):
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Tomorrow,
we have a disaster on the water that was iron
tockally the unintended result of improved safety standards. H