The Egyptians are getting good at peaceful revolutions. A British protectorate from 1914, Egypt gained its formal independence in 1922 after tens of thousands of Egyptians - merchants and peasants, Muslims and Christians - stopped work for weeks. The British more or less gave up. Egypt proclaimed a democratic constitution in 1923 and held its first parliamentary election in 1924 - giving the Wafd (Delegation) Party a landslide victory. Thus began Egypt's first turbulent experiment in democracy. It lasted until domestic fascists put an end to it in 1936.
People who say Egypt has no "tradition of democracy" are, strictly speaking, wrong. It's true that Egypt's democracy lasted only a dozen years - but those years matter. Egyptian democracy did exist, and Egyptians did embrace it. And, however imperfectly, Egyptian democracy did function.
When Egyptians go to the polls once again, possibly this year, they will reconnect with this forgotten era - and the Wafd Party will again be one of the choices on the ballots.
In its platform, published in October, the New Wafd Party endorses free-market economics, pledges freedom of religion, promises the full participation of women in public life - and explicitly declares its existential purpose: to "revive the legacy of liberalism" that thrived in Egypt's own spectacular belle époque of the 1920s.
And Egypt experienced its own Roaring Twenties - a decade of land reforms, irrigation systems, cotton exports and dam building. In politics and economics, it reflected the optimistic zeitgeist of 20th-century liberalism. Early in the decade, King Fuad established a 30-member commission (landowners, merchants, lawyers, religious leaders, judges and intellectuals) to design a parliamentary system.
The commission took a year to write Egypt's democratic constitution. Almost a century later, Egypt's military rulers now seek to do the same job (with eight members) in a couple of months. Modelled mostly on Belgium's constitutional monarchy but with traces of the American republic, the Fuad constitution gave the king some veto power (subject to override by two-third majority votes in the parliament); a senate with staggered elections; and a chamber of deputies, one representative for every 60,000 people, with its own staggered elections. With troops still on the ground, Britain retained a de facto veto power as well - and occasionally used it.
In a 2006 study of this era, Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936, Duke University political scientist Abdeslam Maghraoui describes Egypt's 1923 constitution as "a faithful reproduction of the liberal principles enforced at that time by many European democracies: equal rights and duties to all Egyptians regardless of race, religion, language, freedom of property and freedom of conscience." But, he notes, it was not Egypt's first experience with democracy. "The Egyptians had a long and diverse practice with semi-democratic colonial institutions that began as early as 1798," when Napoleon invaded Egypt.
In practice, he says, Egypt's democracy "performed rather poorly." One problem was the rival veto powers held by Britain and King Fuad. But it performed no more poorly than other democracies of the era. "Poor functioning is not surprising in a nascent democracy," he says.
"The constitutional crises that marred Egyptian politics in the interwar period are not unique," Prof. Maghraoui insists. "It is hard to trace democratic development to smooth progress even in the most solid of Western democracies." For Canadians, the FLQ crisis comes to mind as collaborative confirmation.
At any rate, Egyptians enthusiastically embraced the democratic experiment. Even for the first election in 1924, political parties sprang into existence. As radically different as parliamentary democracy was from Islamic antecedents, these parties showed they could co-exist, Prof. Maghraoui says, "in a reasonable human and institutional environment for the flourishing of democratic political pluralism."
He adds: "The nationalist elites never encouraged extremist, anti-liberal ideologies. The parties and their leaders did not waver in their commitment to play by the rules of the game." Until 1936, that is, when the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt - think Hitler Youth - took democracy down. Egypt's history since has been one long tale of despotic oppression and coercive institutions.
The brave Egyptian insurrectionists have won the right to government by consent of the people. Within months, we hope, Egypt will reverberate again with the discordant sounds of democracy. After all, they want them back.