On Tuesday there was to be a declaration of their Egyptian policy in the House of Lords by the Government. This news of the Sultan's intervention seems, in fact, to have been a crisis of the moment brought on by the Rothschilds with the support of Bismarck. The relations between Constantinople and the National Party in Egypt had become strained in the last few weeks through various circumstances which it is time now to explain, as well as the peculiar communications which passed in the month of February between the Sultan and Arabi, communications which are of the greatest possible importance in estimating Arabi's growing position of political power in Egypt superior to that of his fellow Ministers.
It will be remembered that when the Sultan's Commissioners visited Egypt in the autumn of 1881 Ahmed Pasha Ratib (not to be confounded with Ratib Pasha, the ex-Khedive's agent), who was one of them and the Sultan's A. D. C., met Arabi in the train on his way to Suez and Mecca, and that they had interchanged ideas and made friends, and that the Pasha had promised to represent him favourably to his master as a good Mohammedan and one loyal to the Caliphate.
This had led to correspondence between them, of which I have in my possession the originals of the following two important documents. They came into my hands, with a mass of other papers, at the time of Arabi's trial.
The two letters were written within three weeks after the Government of Mahmud Sami was formed, in February, 1882, in which Government Arabi was Minister of War.
- The first is from Ahmed Ratib,
- the second from Sheykh Mohammed Zafir, one of the great religious sheykhs of Constantinople, who at that time was charged with the Sultan's secret correspondence;
and both were written at the Sultan's personal command.