Death of Sultan Hussein Kamel

On 9 October 1917 the Sultan of Egypt, Hussein Kamel, died in Cairo. He was 63 and had reigned for less than three years. That same day the throne passed to his younger half-brother, Prince Ahmed Fuad, who took the name Fuad I. The late sultan was buried with great pomp in Cairo’s al-Rifa’i Mosque.

Hussein Kamel, a son of the former khedive Isma’il Pasha, had become the first Sultan of Egypt in December 1914. The British then proclaimed a protectorate over the country, which formally still belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and deposed the Khedive Abbas II Hilmi, who was in Constantinople. The new title was meant to emphasise the break with Turkey, but the sultan’s power was largely symbolic. During the war the country was in practice governed by the British High Commissioner and the military command under martial law. Hussein Kamel mostly did not oppose this, which led many Egyptians to see him as a British puppet. In 1915 nationalists twice tried to kill him. When he was dying, Egypt was the main base of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force of General Edmund Allenby, which was preparing for the autumn offensive in Palestine.

Who would follow the sultan

It had long been said in Egypt that the throne had been refused by the sultan’s only son, Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein. A general and later a well-known explorer of the Western Desert, he was married to a sister of the deposed Abbas II, and according to a widespread version he did not want to reign under a British protectorate. This view is repeated by one of the characters of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Palace Walk (Bayn al-Qasrayn), published in 1956, whose action begins in Cairo during the war. The matter was more complicated, however. On taking the throne in 1914 Hussein Kamel had agreed with the British to postpone settling the rules of succession, so formally there was no heir to the throne. According to the American historian Kyle Anderson, the British chose Fuad as early as 21 September 1917, three weeks before the sultan’s death. According to other accounts, they also asked Kamal el Dine to renounce his rights formally, so that in the eyes of Egyptians it would not look as though they had kept the son from his father’s throne. Kamal el Dine did indeed renounce them in writing. Historians still argue over whether he was moved by dislike of the protectorate, his wife’s influence, or simply a lack of interest in politics.

The new sultan

Ahmed Fuad was 49. He was one of the youngest sons of Isma’il Pasha. After his father’s overthrow in 1879 he grew up with him in exile in Naples, and was educated at the military academy in Turin. In 1908 he became the first rector of the newly founded Egyptian University, today’s Cairo University. The British regarded him as a man who, like his brother, would cause no trouble for the rest of the war. These calculations proved short-sighted. In 1919 a revolution against British rule broke out in Egypt, and in 1922 Britain unilaterally recognised the country’s independence. Fuad then changed his title from sultan to king and reigned until his death in 1936.