Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Peter Mansfield, whose classic book on Egypt I am presenting here, was both a journalist and a political writer. But that was not how he began his career. Having finished his studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he joined the British Foreign Service in 1955. He was sent to learn Arabic at the Middle East Centre of Arabic studies in Lebanon, but resigned from the service over the 1956 Suez Affair. He remained in Lebanon until 1962, working as a political and economic journalist. From 1959 to 1961 he edited the Middle East Forum and from 1961 to 1967 he was Middle East correspondent, shuttling between Beirut and Cairo with occasional visits to other Arab countries.

It was during this period of time that I got to know Mansfield and was always impressed by his honesty and sympathy towards the new Egypt and the rest of the Arab World. Apart from a number of books he has published on Egypt and the Arabs -- in fact one of these books is called The Arabs -- he has been supervising the publication Who's Who in the Middle East.

Peter Mansfield was one of the first, if not the first, to observe and record the changes which the 1952 Revolution brought to Egypt. What is more, he was enthusiastic about those changes. This enthusiasm comes out clearly in his book Nasser's Egypt, a Penguin book first published in 1965 with many revised editions appearing later.

For a hundred years, under Khedives and Kings, Egypt was a little more than a corrupt satellite evolving in turn round Turkey, France and Britain. But under Nasser, says Peter Mansfield, Egypt constituted a magnet for the Arab World, a force in African Affairs, and an audible voice in the conduct of international business.

The Egyptian Revolution, says Mansfield: "which deposed a hundred and fifty years old dynasty and destroyed the well entrenched power of an immensely wealthy and self-confident ruling class, can claim to be the least violent in recorded history."

Peter Mansfield, in all his writings, reflected genuine understanding of the docile and humorous psychology of Egyptians. Egyptian revolutionaries, Mansfield says, "do not have to be classified as Marxists, Titoists or anything else. The history of Egypt provides their driving force and their goal. For what these young officers wanted most of all was to make up for the 2500 years in which Egypt's history was shaped by foreigners."

Mansfield goes into the minutest details about the Revolution, its beginning, the officers who were instrumental in shaping it and carrying it out, then the differences which, later on, emerged and how they were resolved.

Mansfield sympathetic feelings for Egypt are reflected in his chapter entitled "The Land and the Fellah", a chapter which begins with a quotation from Father Airot's well known book The Fellaheen of Egypt. "Here man belongs to the land, it is not the land that belongs to him."

In this chapter, Mansfield describes the land, the valley and the Delta of Lower Nile, the serene palm trees, the brilliant green colour standing against the chocolate earth and a soft blue sky, the somnolent buffaloes cooling themselves in the canals and the overwhelming impression of the ancient fertile land carefully and lovingly tended. But the civilised beauty of the Egyptian countryside, as the author calls it, should not conceal the fact that most of the people who inhabit it are as poor as anywhere on earth.

The creator's of Egypt's wealth, the fellahin have been oppressed, neglected and despised for so long that it was not surprising that one of the first acts of the Revolution was Agrarian Reform, Mansfield says. He then goes on to explain what the reform entailed, the appropriation of large estates and the redistribution among the fellaheen, the creation of cooperative societies to assist the new small holders by supplying tested seeds as well as modern machinery which they could not acquire for themselves, the combined units with doctors, agricultural experts attached. Then he goes on to describe the High Dam and its effects on the country, discussing the pros and cons of these policies.

In conclusion, Mansfield argues "And if the central problem of the 20th century is to prevent the widening of the gap between the developed and the underdeveloped nations, the efforts of Egypt against formidable obstacles are deserving sympathy."