Fuad I
Fuad spent nineteen years as head of an independent Egypt that was occupied, under a constitution he spent most of his reign suspending. He was educated in Italy and Turkey, spoke Arabic imperfectly for most of his life, and was a younger son with no expectation of ruling; the British made him sultan in 1917 after deposing his nephew, on the reasonable assumption that he would be pliable. Two years later the arrest and deportation of a delegation of politicians who had asked to put Egypt's case at the Paris peace conference set off a national rising that ran for months, involved strikes, sabotage and rural revolt, and drew in women demonstrating publicly for the first time. It did not expel the British but it made the existing arrangement unworkable. In 1922 Britain unilaterally declared Egypt independent while reserving control of imperial communications, defence, foreign interests and the Sudan - which is to say, everything. Fuad became king. The constitution of 1923 gave Egypt a parliament, and every free election it ever held was won by the nationalist party that had been deported in 1919. Fuad's answer was to use the royal power of dissolution and the British preference for a compliant palace: he dismissed governments that had majorities, ruled through minority cabinets, suspended the constitution, and in 1930 replaced it with one of his own that lasted five years before the street forced its repeal. The three-cornered struggle between palace, party and occupier defined Egyptian politics until 1952 and discredited all three. It is also the context in which a schoolteacher founded, in the canal town of Ismailia in 1928, a movement to rebuild society from below through religion rather than through a parliament that never governed; the Muslim Brotherhood was a response to exactly the deadlock Fuad's reign produced. He died in 1936, weeks before the treaty that finally set terms for a British withdrawal that did not happen.
- Lived: 1868 CE – 1936 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
