The Bombardment of Alexandria

In 1882 (1299 AH) Egypt was in the grip of a national crisis. Decades of khedival overspending had put the country's finances under European control, and resentment of foreign domination and of the privileges of Europeans and the Turco-Circassian elite had risen into a movement under the army officer Ahmad Urabi (Orabi), whose slogan, Egypt for the Egyptians, demanded constitutional government and an end to foreign tutelage. As the crisis sharpened and the khedive's authority weakened, Britain and France sent a fleet to Alexandria. In July 1882 the British squadron bombarded the city's seafront and forts, and much of the waterfront was wrecked and burned; a British army then landed and, in September, destroyed Urabi's forces at Tel el-Kebir. Urabi was captured and exiled, the khedive restored as a figurehead, and Egypt passed under a British occupation that, in one form or another, would last until the middle of the twentieth century, though Egypt was never formally annexed and the Ottoman sultan remained its nominal sovereign. For Egyptians and for the wider Muslim world the bombardment and occupation were a bitter lesson in the reach of European power and the fragility of a state whose finances and then whose sovereignty had been taken from it. The Urabi movement was later remembered as an early stirring of modern Egyptian nationalism. This scene depicts the morning after the bombardment, the shattered Alexandria seafront with the ironclads still lying offshore.