The Suez Canal Opens

In November 1869 (1286 AH) the Suez Canal was opened, a sea-level channel cut for some hundred and sixty kilometres through the desert isthmus that had joined Africa to Asia and separated the Mediterranean from the Red Sea. It was the great project of the Khedive Ismail (rahimahu Allah), the ambitious modernising ruler of Egypt, carried out by the French-led Suez Canal Company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, and it was dug in large part by the forced labour of Egyptian peasants under the corvee, of whom great numbers died in the work before the system was curtailed. The canal transformed world trade and the route from Europe to India and the East, and its Mediterranean mouth grew a wholly new port city, Port Said. Ismail meant the canal and his other works, the railways, the rebuilt cities, the schools, to make Egypt a modern power and famously said he wished it to be part of Europe; the opening in 1869 was celebrated with extraordinary lavishness. But the cost ruined the Egyptian treasury: within a few years Ismail was forced to sell Egypt's shares in the canal to the British government in 1875, foreign controllers took charge of Egypt's finances, and the mounting crisis led directly to the British occupation of 1882. The canal thus stands as a double symbol, the achievement of a modernising Muslim state and the instrument by which it lost its independence. This scene depicts the waterway at its opening, the straight channel through the desert, the mingled steam and sail, and the new port town of Port Said.