THE EGYPTIAN TROUBLE.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 April 1919, Page 5

THE EGYPTIAN TROUBLE.

FIGHTING WITH BEDOUINS. Cairo, March 15. A number of bodies have been discovered in a guard's Van. The British defeated Bedouins at Fayuin with 400 casualties. Before the war nationalism, so-called, was financed mainly by the Khedive, who, virtually throughout* his reign, was in touch with anti-British agitators, Turkish agents, and German spies, says the Lyttelton Times, in comment on the trouble in Egypt. It was the business of (he. Egyptian Government to co-operate with the British Agent, and the Khedive did not hesitate to intrigue against his own Ministers. But the strengtH of the extreme nationalist movement in recent years lay in the Pan-Islamic activity of the Turks, whose policy was industriously taught among the religious arid university students. This was, ostensibly, a religious riioverridnt, and for that reason it made fax wider appeal in Egypt than a purely political movement would have made. It sSems never to have influenced the fellaheen to any considerable extent, but probably its agents argued .that the fellaheen could be brought into it if occasion arose. Probably the engineers of the Egyptian rising will prove to have been notorious nationalist agitators Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sliaivish, a Tunisian who was at one time assistant professor of Arabic at Oiford. Sliawish used to control a seditious journal in ?f?ypt, and he and a confederate, Farid, had to flee to Constantinople to escape prosecution for treason. In Constantinople ShaWish got into touch with the Comfnittee of Union and Progress, attached himself to TalaSt and Enver, and, obtaining plenty of funds from them, established a nationalist journal, which circulated secretly in Egypt. The movement thereafter was organised from Constantinople, but there were active agents in Cairo and Alexandria, negotiations were opened with the Senussists, and help was sought from the Germans, as the' confessions of the German lieutenant Mors, arrested at Alexandria, at the end of 1914, made very elear. It is not very easy, and perhaps it would not be very profitable, to follow out the activities of the various anti-British agencies, including Enver's notorious Arab Bureau, but it seems safe to assume that the present rising was plotted in Constantinople, and that it ,was managed in Egypt by the placemen, Court parasites and corrupt officials, who lost their jobs when the British protectorate was declared.