 I'm tempted to skip in to the microphone and skip out, you're not here to listen to me. I'm delighted to introduce Khaled Fahmi. I'm genuinely delighted. Sometimes for a chairman it is a duty, but believe me this is more than a duty. I'm not going to give you even a hint of the bio because you can read it for yourselves. We are lucky, we are really lucky that the Professor at Cambridge, a Professor of History, is someone of the Halibah and energy of Khaled, which you will now experience in the next few moments. He has worked, done distinguished work in the United States and in Oxford and elsewhere, but you want the details, look at the bio. We are going to try to have about 35 minutes from Khaled. We'll do our best. I've been told that lunch should be, I have a fatwa to the effect that lunch will be at 10 past 1. Let's see how we get on. Thank you. Thank you very much Roger. I would like to start by thanking the organisers and also thanking you all for coming. I prepared a written text, so I hope you don't mind if I actually deliver it while reading. On November 11, 2013, the military research department of the Egyptian Armed Forces staged a huge event commemorating the 99th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Major General Amin Hossein, assistant to the Minister of Defence, delivered the speech which extolled the participation of the Egyptian army in the war and highlighted, quote, the heroic sacrifices of the Egyptian army in the war and its magnificent deeds which changed the course of military history and which contributed to the upkeep of lofty principles of human civilisations, unquote. According to the Facebook page of the sportsman of the armed forces, the celebration consisted of a photo exhibit that relied on the recently released documents from the British and French National Archives to illustrate the participation of the Egyptian army in the war. In addition, the Facebook page added there was an exhibition of rare photos illustrating, quote, the sacrifices of the oldest standing army in the world and how this army maintained the stability of the Egyptian state and maintained Egypt's cultural heritage passed down from the time of the Pharaohs till the present time, unquote. The Facebook page ended by explaining that the celebration also entailed screening a documentary film that illustrated how the Egyptian army fought in the three continents side by side with the Allies, how it succeeded in repelling an Ottoman attack from the east, a Sinusi attack from the west, and a Darfuri attack from the south. The Egyptian army fought in Syria, in Iraq, in Arabia, and on the European front with 100,000 soldiers, Muqatil. These troops belong to the labour corps which the sportsman added is akin nowadays to the army corps of engineer, Salah el Mohandesin. They also belong to the camel corps which we are told again is akin to the border security force. These 100,000 troops who fought in Belgium, in France, in Greece, and in Italy were told were a major factor behind the Allied victory in the First World War, and many of these men were subsequently decorated with the prestigious Victoria Cross as a recognition of the zeal and bravery. What is odd about this celebration is not only its reference to recently released British and French documents, for no such documents dating from the First World War were recently released by the British or the French National Archives, or its claim that the Pheasant Day Egyptian army is somehow related to the pharaohs. What was strange was the claim that Egyptian soldiers were decorated with the Victoria Cross for there is not a single Egyptian among the 1,358 recipients of that award assuming in the first place that receiving such an award from an imperial occupying power is something about which an Egyptian soldier should be proud. Above all, what was truly odd was that this was the first time we in Egypt have heard of the participation of the Egyptian armed forces in the First World War. For 99 years the army never staged such a commemoration, but then suddenly in 2013 and for the following four years these celebrations were staged with such pomp and ceremony. In 2014, in 2015, in 2016, and in 2017 the army staged the same huge celebrations in which the same speech was delivered verbatim, albeit by a different major general each year. These celebrations culminated with a photo op in which the Egyptian flag was hoisted next to that of European countries and European military attachés in Cairo appeared eager to correct a huge historical oversight and to recognize the forgotten sacrifices of the Egyptian army in the First World War. Then, suddenly, and on the centenary of the war's end last November, these celebrations ended as mysteriously as they had started five years prior. This time, no festivities were held, no speeches were delivered, and no pictures were taken. The only article that appeared in 2018 referring to the participation of the Egyptian armed forces in the first world war was a lead article in Al-Ahram written by Cairo University's political science professor Ali Din Hillel. Hillel's article repeated the same details mentioned in the army's communicates of the previous years, but with two important qualifications, differences. The first is that instead of stating that Egypt contributed with only 100,000 troops Hillel claimed that the size of the Egyptian force was 1.5 million men. Secondly, Hillel thanked a certain Dr Ashraf Sabri, who is identified as a specialist in military history for his diligent research efforts and for unveiling to the world the size and nature of Egypt's Egyptian army's contribution to the First World War. This reference to Dr Sabri confirmed my suspicion that it was this man who had convinced the army's hybras of the significance of the army's contribution to the war effort and of the importance of shedding light on a forgotten episode of Egypt's military history. Ever since the sudden start of these mysterious celebrations, I have been noticing oblique references to this doctor and have been curious to find out more about his contribution to military history. I managed to identify him in the various celebrations, but I failed to find any publications by him in Arabic or in any foreign language on the subject of the First World War or any war for that matter, foreign or Egyptian. After a couple of Google hits, however, I finally came across an interview he gave in 2014 to El Bewebe News, an online publication in which it transpired that he was a doctor of right, but a doctor in undersea medicine. Chabyr Ffotibb Al-Ama. That he owns a scuba diving club in Chalmys Sheikh and another one in Alexandria, and it was while pursuing his hobby of the Northern coast of Cairo of Egypt that he discovered shipwrecks dating from the First World War. This suspicious happenstance is what triggered his interest in the history of the First World War, but this interest was not directed to studying the impact this war had on Egyptian society, a subject that is well studied and meticulously documented, but at analyzing the participation of the Egyptian army in it, a subject that no one has ever heard of and one that has somehow evaded the attention of countless historians of the First World War. There are two important claims that Dr Sabri made, claims which the Egyptian army subsequently embraced and repeated for five years and claims which are intimately connected to the subject of this conference, that is the 1919 evolution and how to make sense of it. The first claim is that in 1914 there was indeed an Egyptian national army and this army fought gallantly on Egypt's western, eastern and southern borders. The second is that up to 100,000 Egyptian soldiers belonging to that army or according to Ali-Din Hillel, 1.5 million soldiers participated in the war effort in various theatres of operation, including that of the Western Front. To elucidate the truth about this first claim and to help disentangle fact from fiction and history from propaganda, it is important to consider the nature, the size and the identity of the Egyptian army during the war and on the eve of the revolution. As is well known, but in this day and age it seems necessary to reiterate basic historical facts. The army that Orabi led back in 1882 did not exceed 13,000 men. After the British had defeated that army in Tel Le Cibir, launching a 72-year long military occupation, Britain decided severely to reduce the size of the Egyptian army and to cut it down to less than half its original size. This was the result of the stringent fiscal measures adopted by Lord Cromer, but also due to the belief among officials in both the colonial and war officers that the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal was too important a matter to be left to Egyptians and that it is Britain which has to undertake the important task of protecting and defending its new prized possession. Most importantly though, whatever its size, the Egyptian army was in fact headed by British officers and its commander-in-chief, the Sardar, was always a British officer. Egyptians were barred from advancing to the senior ranks and few of them were promoted beyond the rank of Sarkh, that is major. Regarding the question of this army fighting the Ottomans in the east, that is in Sinai, the Sinusi in the west, and the Darfuris in the south details that I suspect Dr Ashraf Sabri got from Latifa Salem's book on Egypt during the First World War. This was done in fulfilment of British, not Egyptian policy, and responding to orders by British, not Egyptian commanders. So there was indeed an Egyptian army during the First World War, but that army was an Egyptian one in name only. It was an army that did Britain's bidding and fulfilled her imperial policy in the region. It was one thing for the present Egyptian army. To link itself to the pharaohs, it is another thing to think of itself as a continuation of a foreign army that occupied the country for 72 years. Moreover, the high brass of the Egyptian army might have been British, but it's frank and file where Egyptian peasants conscripted according to a conscription law, a law that allowed people to buy their way out of service. Be that as it may, might these conscripts have been those referred to by Dr Ashraf Sabri and Dr Ali-Din Hilal? Is it true that 100,000 men or 1.5 million men who fought in Syria in Iraq and Arabia were soldiers fighting in the Egyptian army? Or were they in fact peasants pressed into serving the British imperial army? To answer this important question, a question whose answer, as I hope to illustrate shortly, is intimately connected to the 1919 evolution and its true nature, we need to go back to the early months of the war and to follow British policy in Egypt as it evolved month by month. When the war broke out in August 1914, Egypt was in a uniquely awkward position diplomatically and legally. Rule since 1840 as a semi-autonomous province by a local dynasty, the Mehmed Ali dynasty, Egypt was technically and legally still under Ottoman suzerainty, and the Ottoman Sultan was its official sovereign. Practically however, and since the military victory in the Telic-Ybiv battle in 1882, the British were the effective rulers of the country. So when the war broke out in August 1914, the British, on the 5th of August, forced the Egyptian government to associate itself with the British declaration of war against Germany and Austria. Accordingly, the Khiddiwiel government expelled Austrian and German diplomats and seized Austrian and German assets. More seriously, when the Ottomans entered the war on November 2, Britain found herself in a very precarious position in Egypt for Egyptians, technically subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, had as such the right to carry arms against their sovereign's enemies, that is the British. To deal with this anomaly, Britain announced martial law on November 2, giving the commander of British troops in Egypt, General John Maxwell, enormous power to arrange people to prevent public gatherings and to censor the press. Furthermore, and as is well known, Britain decided to end Egypt's confusing and to them dangerous, ambivalent legal status, and on December 18, 1918 declared Egypt to be a protectorate. On that day, Koreans woke up to read in the papers and on the walls of the city the following proclamation. His British Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs gives notice that, in view of the state of war arising out of action of Turkey, Egypt is placed under the protection of his Majesty and will henceforth constitute a British protectorate. The sovereignty of Turkey over Egypt is disseminated and his Majesty's government will adopt all measures necessary for the defence of Egypt and protect its inhabitants and interests. British officials also announced the deposition of Khidif Abbas, who since his accession to power in 1892 had opposed British influence and who purely by accident was in Istanbul when war broke out in Europe. In Abbas's place as Sultan of Egypt, the British selected his uncle Hussein Kamil regarded as sympathetic to British interests. In the brief span of five months, Egypt had moved from an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire temporarily occupied by British forces until order should be restored to a British protectorate under martial law. Khidiviaid had been replaced by a Sultanate and its ruler Abbas, a proporter of nationalist and anti-British activists had been replaced by a pro-British monarch. Most crucially concerned with where the loyalties of Egyptians lay and suspicious of the depth of their sympathies with the Sultan was doubling as a caliph, the British issued a declaration on November 7 recognizing the religious and moral ties that Egyptians may have towards the caliphate and exempted them from military duty and announced that it alone will carry the burden of defending Egypt. However, given that the war dragged on for months and months with no end in sight, and given that throughout 1916 and early 1917 the British were facing serious difficulties in Gallipoli, in Ilcwt and southern Mesopotamia, and closer to home in the Sinai and Palestine campaign, British officials in London were having second thoughts about the earlier decision to exempt Egypt from the war effort. According to Kyle Anderson of the SUNY of State University of New York who conducted the research in the British National Archives, the war office wrote in May 1917 to the commander of the Egyptian expeditionary force, which again was Egyptian only in name, and which has been established a year before, telling him that, quote, it is essential that all parts of the empire should share in the strain of the war as far as local conditions admit. As regards Egypt, I'm not satisfied that this is the case, unquote. By June 1917, the war office suggested that forced conscription into the British imperial force be instituted with the aim of raising 17,000 men from the British-led Egyptian army. The idea of forced conscription was dropped, and instead Egyptian peasants were to be asked to volunteer to serve in the imperial war effort in exchange for exemption from conscription. So, on the 20th of October 1917, the Minister of War in London issued a decree modifying the Egyptian conscription law so that, quote, every person, liable for military service shall be exempt from the obligation to such a service if he shall enlist in and serve for a continuous period of one year with any auxiliary service attached to British troops, unquote. Thus was born the famous Egyptian labour corps to whom both Ashraf Sabri and Ali Dinhilal refer. Before looking closely into the composition of this force and before raising the central question of whether these men were peasants or soldiers, and before determining which army they served in, it may be important to clarify how many men we are talking about. Here, Kyle Anderson again gives the most up-to-date estimates based on information culled from the British National Archives. Using official British correspondence, Anderson calculates that a little over while you see the figure here. You don't need to repeat it. It's about 327,000 all-in-all. The first deployment of these men was as transport workers assisting the Egyptian expeditionary force in the campaign in Sinai. They built this railway line that you see in black at the north part of the map. And then in Palestine. There they extended railway lines and in unloading supplies from surf boats off the coast of Palestine. But they also served in Aqaba, in Mesopotamia, in Salonica, in Modros and in France. All efforts to rely on Egyptian archival sources in order to flesh out the history of these thousands of men or to corroborate their number have ended in failure. The Egyptian National Archives, which is a real treasure, which is where I did my original research some 20 years ago, has effectively closed down. Permits which used to be secured from some mysterious security agencies, agency has basically dwindled to NIL. At the same time, the military archives, the Darul Machfuzat y Mercazea i'r Cwetr Musallaha, is an institution about which Egyptians are not even aware of its existence. And as far as I know, there are only two Egyptian historians who have been admitted in it. As a result, research is eager to find out more about the Egyptian labour corps, who its members were, and how they experienced war have to rely on non-Egyptian primarily British sources. I have already referred to Kyle Anderson's research into British correspondence housed in the Egyptian National Archives here at Q. Anderson takes us into the nitty-gritty details of the recruitment process and how these men were volunteered into service by their Omdes and their provincial governors. Two key points become immediately obvious from Anderson's careful research. Firstly, these men were never considered soldiers akin to Australian, New Zealander or Indian troops. The members of the Egyptian labour corps were civilian through and through. They were never given military ranks, never received military training and never handed military uniforms. However, as we shall see shortly, they were subjected to severe military discipline. Second, the Egyptian labour corps into which these men were volunteered were part of the British, not the Egyptian army. Indeed, as I pointed out before, to press peasants into volunteering to the labour corps, which was called an Arabic frikh et al omel al masreia, peasants were given an exemption from conscription into the Egyptian army using British archival sources. Dr Alia Musallam, who has done more than anyone else to flesh out the daily experiences of these men, has found this interesting document in the British National Archives, which clearly shows how volunteering in the Egyptian labour corps was legally speaking a service rendered to the British army and to be paid for by British, not the Egyptian government. Amazingly, Alia Musallam conducted an oral history with these men to get at their experience in the labour corps into which they had been first. She did this in an ingenious manner. She tracked down a particular song that these men used to sing. The men she tells us used to sing a particularly sad song in Sinai, in Palestine and in France. They sang it while working on the railways, while unloading supplies from surfboards and while digging trenches on the western front. Alia Musallam listens to the men singing and in addition to analysing the words of the song and its music, she paints a detailed picture of their living conditions. When I say conducted an oral history, I don't mean of course that she interviewed these men. Rather, she relied on British archival records, which referred to this song and to the men singing it. Specifically, Alia Musallam tracked down accounts by British officers commenting on this sad song and by tracking down the dates and locations of these official accounts, she managed to follow the men and the singing, so to speak, from Cairo, to Arish, to Rafah, to Aika, to Beirut, to Latakia and finally on board the ships that took them to Bologna, to Bologna a few miles behind the western front. She also found British reports of the same song being sung by these men upon returning home in 1918. As I said, it is an ingenious oral, social, cultural history of these men in distress. The song, of course, is nothing other than Ya Aziz Aini that said the wish composed and that Naeem Al-Masariah sang in the years just before the outbreak of the war. Going through the history of the phonograph industry in Egypt, Alia Musallam argues that Ya Aziz Aini or Apple of My Eye is originally a folkloric song that dates to even earlier times and that its lyrics of estrangement and loss might be reflective of earlier experiences of conscription. As someone who has worked on the history of conscription in Mehmed Ali's army some 80 years earlier, I find the argument about the sentiment scored by this song very plausible. O Apple of My Eye, I want to go back home. O Apple of My Eye, I want to go back home. O Apple of My Eye, your absence is beyond me. My darling arose ready to depart, and he came to bid me farewell. He wept, drenching his handkerchief, and I asked, why do this? Is crying your sport or are you teasing me? Crying is neither my sport nor am I teasing you. The talk of the awazel is bitter and painful. O Apple of My Eye, how I feel sorry for myself. Analysing the song, Alia Musallam argues that the song is layered in format. It sways back and forth between the experience of those who were sent to the war in the refrain O Apple of My Eye, I want to go back home, and the bitterness of those left behind is crying your sport or are you teasing me? Crucially, Musallam remarks that in later versions of the song, versions contemporaneous with the war, the words of the refrain changes to baladi a baladi o sulta chedded baladi, or my home country and the authorities have taken my son. The song, in its different versions, plugs at codes of estrangement, experience in Upper Egypt prior to the war and extending through it. In another brilliant study, Alia Musallam analyzes this key term, a sulta, the authorities. Continuing her pioneering oral history project, she listens to performances and jokes by workers on local and war funds overheard and documented in detail by an overseeing lieutenant, as well as chants and slogans during the 1919 revolt that show an anti-government and often an anti-waft sentiment. She then grafts this oral material, so to speak, on to the amazing memoir of Aesmat Sefyd Dawle, published in two volumes in 1995-96. Sefyd Dawle was a renowned Egyptian lawyer and Pan-Arab thinker, and his memoirs of a village shows a perceptive observer of village mores that he analyzes with a keen anthropological eye. But what concerns us here is his description of his grandfather's experience in the Egyptian labour corps, which he includes in the second volume of the memoir. The entire volume can in fact be read as an extensive gloss on this key term, a sulta, the combined imperial military and local administrative administration during the war. I read Sefyd Dawle's memoir carefully and was captivated by his insights and his amazing command of language. But I prefer to rely again on Alia Musallam and her careful reading of Sefyd Dawle's complex text with regard how a sulta tried to control the lives and bodies of the thousands of Egyptians who were compressed into the labour corps. One particularly poignant tale that Sefyd Dawle relates and that Musallam analyzes is that of Abbas Abdallah, the village intellectual and his nephew Eunus. Abbas, realizing that volunteering is exactly this, volunteering, tatawer, concludes that it has to be based on consent. He therefore makes a subversive suggestion. Peasants from his village Al-Himameya, from Upper Egypt, who refused to be pressed into the labour corps, should sign a petition stating their objections. Anticipating the petition gathering tactic of Al-Waft, Abbas pursws a legal tactic that would challenge a sulta by a sulta. After collecting signatures of peasants from his and neighboring villages who objected to being volunteered into the labour corps, he struggles to present his petition to the authorities as sulta. But then, and in Musallam's words, just when he thought he tricked the law by the law, he found himself outsmarted by it. For when he attempted to use the logic of the law to opt out of the war, and when he approached the Asyut police station after many unsuccessful attempts, his petition was finally given the attention that he had requested. The maormor of the station asked him if he could testify orally and in writing that every villager mentioned in the petition did indeed object to volunteer for the war, and also that any villager that was not on the petition would by implication be willing to volunteer. When he signed, Abbas was arrested on the account of the fact that according to his own testimony, those villagers whose names were not in the petition would not object to being volunteered for the war. He forgot to put his own name. At this point, Eunice Abbas's nephew steps in seeing that his uncle was dragged in the labour corps after his attempt to spare his fellow villagers had failed. Eunice stepped forward and offered himself as a replacement of Abbas, and his account is the only one we have of a peasant who served in the Egyptian labour corps on the Western Front. Eunice's account, as told by Saifidawla, is the most compelling account we have of service on the Western Front. Eunice provides graphic details of the brutal existence these men faced in the trenches, the meager claws that they were given, the hostility of the locals, the bad food, the cold, the mud, the stench and the disease. All of this because a sulta decreed to send them to a senseless war that the European countries had started and that soon engulfed the world, ultimately reaching their own village. As miserable as the men felt, they soon realized that being sent as workers meant that they possessed a key asset that they could use against a sulta, namely their own labour. In their camp, near Calais, one of them, Thabit, is appointed as the leader, Raius, and they are assigned to a Moroccan sergeant, Khalifa, who acted as their translator and overseer. Soon, Raius Thabit gives them an important lesson. What matters most to the French, he tells them, is that we don't stop working. So every time we needed something, we would sleep in a little longer. So the French would come and shout in their language and the Moroccan would tell them that we didn't want to work because the food was too little and they would provide us with more. Everything we needed, even the heavy tea, the tobaccos, even red meat, we would never ask for. We learned that if we asked, we would never get what we requested. We learned that they are people who, ychaf rwme eich tishoosh, people who have fear but no shame, our weapon was ready. We stopped working and Thabit would say the men want this and they would bring it straight away. This audacity, however, soon attracts the wrath of the French military authorities. Eunice explains how, when winter set in, one of his fellow labourers, Qubaisi, already sick and malnourished, literally froze to death. The men asked for hot water to cleanse his body and a blanket to use him to use as a shroud, but the French authorities refused both and rushed to snatch the body, piled it on a wooden carriage and took it away. The group was thrown into panic. To die in a lghorba is one thing, but not to be buried properly meant another degree of loss. It meant oblivion. The group, therefore, decided to go on strike to stand as one and to demand to go back home. The strike for food and work went on for five days, at the end of which a French general dubbed as jinn or fire pan on general, comes to negotiate with them. His negotiations failed, so he ordered them to stand in the rain. In defiance, they sit down. The general returns, an argument ensues, and Rai Stabit loses his temper, attacks the general and kills him. At this point, the French soldiers fire at point blank, killing Thabit and the entire group, with the exception of Eunice, who feined death and lived to tell the story from his mandara in El Chimamia. What is amazing about Aes Matzifidawla's memoir is that it doesn't stop at offering this unique account of the lives of members of the Egyptian Labour Corp on the Western Front. Rather, the last third of the second volume takes us back to El Chimamia and follows a particularly brutal power struggle over land, land owned by absentee landlords who reside in Cairo, and which peasants consider to be rightly theirs. When Eunice returns from the front in 1918, the countryside is already teeming with rebellion. After four years of hardship, during which time peasants saw their cattle snatched, the crops confiscated, and their men dragged to serve in a war that meant nothing to them, they finally had enough. Already in summer and autumn of 1918, a good six months before the outbreak of the revolution, the countryside is seeing acts of sabotage of arson and of murder. As was the case elsewhere in the world, in Algeria, in West Africa, and earlier in Russia, peasants rose up against a sulta. In Egypt, this peasant revolt, which Ellis Goldberg and Reinhard Schultzer have dubbed the largest peasant revolt in modern Egyptian history, is the true beginning of the 1919 evolution. The sulta that these peasants rebelled against was at once that of the British military authorities who occupied the country, the authority of the Egyptian government who did their bidding by requisitioning their produce and snatching their men, as well as the authority of the landlords who countered moderation in hopes of ringing concession after the war. In a recent article published in Madamas, Hakeem Abdel Naeim published an article titled, What is the first thing that pops to your mind when 1919 evolution is mentioned? The article is a thoughtful analysis of the popular imagination of the 1919 evolution, and Abdel Raheem Abdel Naeim concludes that this imagination is primarily a visual one shaped by Egyptian films and TV series. He also argues that this visual imagination locates the revolution in the city, primarily in Cairo, and reduces the revolution to a series of demonstrations protesting against the arrest of Saad and his colleagues and culminates in the army opening fire on the demonstrations on the 10th of March. Then there are of course the cliché images of upper class women participating in the demonstrations and Coptic and Muslim clichés clerics holding hands. Absent from this popular imagination, Abdel Naeim argues, are scenes of the workers' strikes in urban centers and the peasant uprising throughout the country in the delta and Saad. In my presentation today, I have tried to point out to recent research that besieges us to locate the origins of the revolution, not on March 9, 1919, when Saad was arrested, but in a much earlier period, in the summer and autumn of 1918, and not to restrict the revolution to Cairo and other cities, but to look for the origins in the countryside among peasants who saw their livelihoods destroyed by four years of war. This was a war in which, as the Arabic saying goes, they neither had a camel nor a she-camel, la na qata lahum wa la gamel, but a war to which they were dragged to serve for years on end and losing in it life and limb. The sacrifices endured during the First World War by Egyptian peasants by far the overwhelming majority of the population are what lay behind the 1919 evolution. A key factor in this hardship was being volunteered in the Egyptian labour corps. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian men were dragged into serving in this dreaded force as part of the British Imperial War effort. The months they spent in the different fields of operation in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in Gallipoli and on the Western Front hardened them and threw into sharp relief the injustice they suffered from back home. While most were eager to return to the comfort of their loved ones, few must have also been radicalised on the front. Upon returning home and upon finding that their compatriots had fed only slightly better due to what a sulta had subjected them to, the situation was then rife for a nationwide revolt to erupt. However, the present Egyptian army is now making preposterous claims that distort the historical record. By relying on a charlatan, it has convinced itself that the Egyptian labour force was composed of soldiers, not of peasants. That this force was part of the Egyptian, not the British army, and that the sacrifices endured during the war were endured by the military rather than by the civilian population. Behind these claims is not the desire to point out a long forgotten chapter in the nation's history or to uphold the right of the Egyptian people to live in peace and dignity. However, as the army spokesman himself admitted to have the opportunity to quote, raise the Egyptian flag in London and in Greece next to the mightiest armies in the world. The army can have its flags and it can have its cheap photo ops, but snatching the 1919 evolution from us just as it has robbed us of the 2011 revolution is something that should not and will not pass. Thank you very much. You must now do your stuff and be brief. That's your job. And my job is to get you out on time. A bit like Brexit, I suppose. And I shall say no more. Who wants to begin? Catch my eye, please, if you do. Nobody? I can't believe it. You're at the back, sir. And then after him, Eugene Rogan, with a distinguished white hair. Presumably, this tells us much more about the role of the Egyptian army in Egyptian politics and Egyptian society today than anything in 1919. Would you care to comment on that? The Egyptian army has a very keen sense of its history. It has a very consistent narrative, a compelling one, clear and consistent. It is only rivaled by the Muslim Brotherhood in this respect. I think these are the two institutions in the country that have a very clear idea of where they come from and where they are heading. I think one of the many problems of the 2011 revolution, and I was there in Tahrir, is that with all the enthusiasm, the kids, the youth and the activists, all the young, they really did not know where they are historically, where they are coming from, where they are heading. Hence the importance of an event like this to alert ourselves of what is it that we're coming from. Are we connected 2011 to 1919 or so? According to the self-perception of the Egyptian army, the Egyptian army goes all the way back to the pharaonic times and it has protected Egypt. When they get it wrong, all the details are wrong. I have further pictures of a spokesman for the army, the head of the Egyptian military museum, who cites all the dates of the battles wrongly. But that's not besides the point. That's not the issue. The issue is that they have a narrative. A narrative is that Egypt is nothing without the army and that the army is the pillar, as it's called, that up keeps Egypt and maintains its stability. Without the army, Egypt would end up being like Syria or Iraq. I completely disagree with this. Egypt is strong because of its people, because of its institutions. Institutions that we spend enormous effort building. The schools, the universities, the press, the syndicates, the bureaucracy, the judiciary. This is what prevents Egypt from slipping into chaos. This is what prevents Egypt from being tribal. That people can be members of sports clubs rather than tribal affiliations. What the Egyptian army is doing now is undermining these very same institutions for nothing other than being power hungry. Then it uses this very consistent, powerful and seductive narrative of we are the pillar, we are the last barrier to chaos. If you're happy, I'll try and take a couple of questions. Eugene, near the back, I was not being rude to Eugene. I was giving a visual aid to our colleagues. On the contrary, I like my white hair. I had to thank you so much for a wonderful paper. I totally share with you a kind of revulsion against this grotesque military capturing at the experience of Egyptians in the First World War. Anyone who's travelled through British or French or German villages will know that there's something in the remembering of the service and suffering of people in those countries that's totally missing in Egypt and in the Ottoman Arab lands, which is some way of remembering the service and sacrifice of men who fought in a war that was, from their view, someone else's war. Yet it seems obscene to forget them too. And so my question to you is how does one go about remembering the Egyptians who actually served in the First World War, not to the glory of the staff, but to not overlook their experience of a war, their contribution to that war, their suffering in that war. I mean, I think there's a gap that needs to be filled in the Arab world in remembering World War One. It was their people, even if it was someone else's war. I'll take a couple of questions if they're very brief because our time is short. Yes, the lady just there. The briefer you are, the more questions I can see. Catherine Smith. It has already been commented that at the end of the First World War Britain faced global problems and it also faced the domestic problem of knowing a very, very large number of people who did not have votes were coming home. And what Britain did at home was institute universal male suffrage and also give a few women some votes. Could anything similar have been done elsewhere which might have changed the overall outcome of the 20th century? And just one more. Could you bring the microphone to Hassan? And I think that will have to be the laughter. I'm sorry, beyond my control. Just following on from Eugene's question, and this is not meant to either take away the focus from Egypt or offer your consolation, but we now know that other, nationals of other countries were also volunteered into the British Army around the First World War, 140,000 Chinese were drafted in. They are also another part of the forgotten history of this period. I wonder whether as a distinct historian you have come across this and what are your thoughts about other nations and nationalities which suffered similar fate. Just very briefly, maybe I'll start with this question and then I'll go back if you don't mind. No, of course, as we now know, especially with the centenary anniversary last November, there has been calls for people to be recognized that this was not a white war. This was a black war. This was a brown war. And the people from Africa, from Asia participated. And there is amazing scholarship, especially by Indian historians, but by others as well, to point out to this very important contribution by non-Europeans and what was a global war. I'm not sure about the case of the Chinese. By the way, the pictures are all online in the Imperial Royal Museum website. And if you go to it, you'll see many, many, many pictures of Chinese and other, but especially Chinese workers. I'm not sure how the Chinese were conscripted, but I know that the Indians were conscripted, were soldiers. And the Africans were soldiers in the French army. What I'm trying to say is that these were not soldiers, were never really conscripted as soldiers, never received training. So I don't know if this is an anomaly that distinguishes the Egyptian labour corps from any other non-European, non-white participant in the first world war. I'm not sure, and I haven't studied this closely. Question about what political reforms that could have happened precisely. I think my argument is that one can think of 1919 evolution as exactly akin to the point you're mentioning. Soldiers coming from the front in this country were basically asking the serious important central political questions. We have sacrificed, we have to have a say in ruling this country. And this is what happened. Through serious perceptive and difficult compromises by the ruling elite to prevent a Bolshevik revolution, they realized the significance and the danger of not yielding. The Egyptian one was problematic because we were fighting two battles. We're fighting for suffrage. We're fighting for freedom. We're fighting local despotism. That's why we wanted the constitution. But we're also fighting foreign occupation. And that is why it was a double challenge. And the jury is out as to whether we could have done better in 1919 or that this is the best that the leadership of that revolution could do. But you're absolutely right that that was the key question. Eugene, I think exactly what Ali is doing. I am not fond of war memorials and war graves particularly. Maybe if it were 100 years ago, I would have seen the point. But I think, I mean, I watched the amazing, this last year's memorials very closely. I watched them live. And I can't remember the name that was given to these amazing sculptures on sand, on beaches in which poetry was read. That is what lasts. And the whole idea is that we don't need big monuments. We don't need statues. We don't need marble. We will etch the pictures, the portraits on the sand to be washed away by the tide, but the memory lingers. The idea here is that the community comes and partakes and it becomes theirs. The problem with monuments is that the state monopolizes it. Of course, this country is very careful about the Senutabh and this becomes a local popular movement from below. And I think the way to do it in a place like Egypt with these hundreds of thousands of people is to alert Egyptians that this is us, not them. You see, the Egyptians are in the slogan, in the revolution early on, 2011, there was this slogan, El Geish with Sha'ab i edwa hda. And I wrote an article, I called it Wa Wa Al Atf. The problem is this wow in the middle, El Geish with Sha'ab. It should be Geish with Sha'ab. The army is setting itself apart from the people. Okay, let them take the army. We, what do we do? These are our men, our grandfathers, our fathers. We want to remember them and this is how we remember them. We tell the songs, I mean they were illiterate so there are no letters. Luckily, the imperial archives have the pictures. We have the songs that they sang and we have these amazing memoirs. And I hope that this is a beginning of a historiographical research that will take a long, long time. The problem, of course, is the Egyptian archives is closed by the security. So that is another challenge. But with some work hopefully we will get there. Thank you.