Denshawai Incident

The Denshawai Incident is the name given to a dispute which occurred in 1906 between British military officers and locals in Egypt, believed to mark a turning point in the British presence in that country. Though the incident itself was a fairly small one in numbers of casualties and injuries, the British officers' response to the incident and its grave consequences were what led to its lasting impact.

Causes of the Incident

There were many tensions that led up to the Denshawai Incident. The Egyptian peoples had a rising sense of nationalism long before the British occupation of the country in 1882. The occupation was touched off by the mutiny of Ahmad Orabi. This mutiny was started by the idea of revolution and liberation of the Egyptian people from their Turkish and European overlords. The British occupation led to dark times for most of the Egyptian peoples, most especially the peasants. The Egyptian government was taken and directed by Lord Cromer. He was in charge of economic reforms and trying to eliminate the debt caused by the khedival regime. These reforms, and their successes, were mainly enjoyed by the upper and middle classes, leaving the poor even poorer.

Since the khedival regime and the upper class enjoyed the British occupation and its abundant success, the middle class was left to the resistance of the British occupation. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, there were many newspapers that exposed the British for their mistakes and the khedival governmental corruption. The positions in the Egyptian government were filled by the British officers. The writers for the newspapers were protesting that those positions could have been as easily filled by capable, educated Egyptians, but that the racism of the British stopped it.

The Incident

On 13 June 1906 five officers of the occupying British army, with their interpreter and a police official, visited Denshawai (AR: دنشواي) to go pigeon shooting. They shot pigeons belonging to villagers who kept them as domestic animals, angering the owners. However, the major catalyst was the accidental shooting of the wife of the prayer leader at the local mosque. Enraged, the Egyptians mobbed the British officers and camp. The British officers opened fire on the villagers, wounding five, and set fire to the grain of Abd-el-Nebi.

Abd-el-Nebi, whose wife had been seriously injured, struck one of the officers with a stick. He was joined by the elderly Hassan Mahfouz, whose pigeons had been killed. Other villagers threw stones at them. The officers, two Irishmen and three Englishmen, surrendered their weapons, along with their watches and money, but this failed to appease the angry villagers.

Two officers escaped, one of whom managed to contact the British Army, but the other died of heatstroke some distance from the village. An Egyptian peasant who tried to help the sick man was killed by soldiers who came across them. Meanwhile, in the village the elders had intervened, saving the remaining soldiers and allowing them to return to their base.

British response

"Instead of showing understanding for the peasants' self-defense against the officer's tactless blundering, the colonial administrators viewed the native's actions as a dangerous popular insurgency that had to be dealt with harshly."^[1]

Concerned about a growing nationalist movement, Egyptian officials used the Denshawai incident as a pretext to harshly punish any resistance to British rule. The next day, the British army arrived, arresting all the men in the village, including Abd-el-Nebi, Hassan Mahfouz, a man called Darweesh and Zahran. At a summary trial (where the judges were mostly British) Hassan, Darweesh, Zahran and one other man were convicted of murdering the officer who had died of sunstroke, and were sentenced to death. One of the judges was Boutros Boutros Ghali’s grandfather.^[2] Abd-el-Nebi and another villager were given a life sentence of penal servitude and twenty-six villagers were given various terms of hard labour and ordered to be flogged. The officers stated that they had been "guests" of the villagers and had done nothing wrong.^[3]

Hassan was hanged in front of his own house. Darweesh said from the gallows:

“May God compensate us well for this world of meanness, for this world of injustice, for this world of cruelty.”

The Egyptian police official accompanying the soldiers to the village did not confirm their story. He testified in court that after Abd-el’s wife had been shot, the officers fired twice more on the mob. For his testimony, he was stood down, and a court of discipline sentenced him to two years imprisonment and fifty lashes.

Consequences

Concerned with growing Egyptian nationalism, British officials chose to show their strength and make an example of the villagers

Commentary

George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play John Bull's Other Island, says that because “they had room for only one man on the gallows, and had to leave him hanging half an hour to make sure [he was dead] and give his family plenty of time to watch him swinging, thus having two hours to kill as well as four men, they kept the entertainment going by flogging eight men with fifty lashes each.”

If her [England’s] empire means ruling the world as Denshawai has been ruled in 1906 – and that, I am afraid, is what the Empire does mean to the main body of our aristocratic-military caste and to our Jingo plutocrats – then there can be no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters…

—George Bernard Shaw

Fifty years later, the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal said “the pigeons of Denshawai have come home to roost”, to describe the eventual defeat of the Anglo-French strikes in Egypt in 1956.

"The Hanging of Zahran" is a poem by Salah Abdel-Sabour about the incident, and Nagui Riad made the film Friend of Life, based on the poem.

References

1. ^ "Saint Joan before the Cannibals": George Bernard Shaw in the Third Reich, Glenn R. Cuomo,German Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), p. 448, Published by: German Studies Association, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1432140
2. ^ Islam in History, by Bernard Lewis, Open Court Publishing, 1993, p.384
3. ^ Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 92.

Bibliography

• "Why Haditha Reminds This Historian of an Awful Chapter in British History". History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/26283.html. Retrieved 06-09-2006.  By Keith David Watenpaugh
• Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.ISBN 0804772126