CHAPTER VI BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT

Arabi was born in 1840, the son of a small village sheykh, the owner of eight and a half acres of land, at Horiyeh, near Zagazig, where his family had been long established and enjoyed a certain local consideration of a semi-religious kind. Like many other village sheykhs they claimed a strain of Seyyid blood in their otherwise purely fellah lineage, and had a tradition of being, on that account, somewhat superior to their rustic neighbours. How far this claim was a valid one—and it has been disputed—I do not know, but it had at least the effect of giving them a desire for better religious education than is to be found in the Delta villages, and Arabi, like his father, was sent as a youth to Cairo and was a student there for two years at the Azhar. At the age of fourteen he was taken for a soldier, and as he was a tall, well-grown lad and Saïd Pasha, the then Viceroy, had a scheme for training the sons of village sheykhs as officers, he was pushed on through the lower ranks of the army, and at the early age of seventeen became lieutenant, captain at eighteen, major at nineteen, and Caimakam, lieutenant-colonel, at twenty. This rapid and unexampled advancement in the case of a fellah was due in part to the protection of the French general under whom he was serving, Suliman Pasha el Franzawi, but still more to the favour shown by the Viceroy, who affected to be, like the mass of his subjects, an Egyptian, not merely a member of the alien Turkish caste, and wished to have fellah officers about him. Arabi, a presentable young fellow, even so far enjoyed his favour as to be named his A. D. C., and in this capacity he accompanied Saïd to Medina the year before his death. It was during this close intercourse with the Viceroy that he acquired his first political ideas, which were those of equality as between class and class, and of the respect due to the fellah as the preponderating element in Egyptian nationality. It is this particular advocacy of fellah rights which distinguished Arabi from the other reformers of his day. The Azhar movement was one of general Mohammedan reform, without distinction of race. Arabi's was essentially a race movement and as such far more distinctly national and destined to be far more popular.