This expression of irritation towards the Wafd was part of an article pub-lished on 11 August 1923 in al-Ah, Egypt's leading newspaper, by Muhammad Salih al-Dahri, a lawyer in a small Delta town named Farskur. It was a warning sign of larger protests that would follow the establishment of the first ‘People's Government’ in January 1924. Although Saad Zaghlul was immensely popular, as attested by the hundreds of thousands of people who came to greet him after his return from his second exile on 17 and 18 September 1923, the Wafd's politics disappointed the rural and urban underprivileged who had been at the forefront of the revolutionary struggle. Once in power, the party that had led the nationalist movement for five years turned out to be a faithful representative of the interests of the Egyptian landowning class and the urban upper middle classes. The government led by Zaghlul – who became prime minister in January 1924 –increasingly assumed the aggressive class nature of its politics. When it became clear that the social demands at the core of the struggles that had taken place throughout the revolution would not be met, discontent became vocal. Both Saad and Safiyya Zaghlul exploited their popularity in many instances to neutralise explosive situations and convince workers or peasants to delay expressions of anger; when this proved inefficient, the ‘People's Government’ resorted to systematic repression against rising popular mobilisations. In February–March 1924, tramway workers who ‘attempted to foment a strike’ were arrested, and communist-led unions in Alexandria were repressed (Beinin 1998b: 317–18). Moreover, Zaghlul exerted a ‘tight-fisted control of the chamber’ (Botman 1998: 291) as well as an accentuated control on the press. Some of the newspapers and magazines that publicly expressed their disagreement were closed down.

Echoes of that irritation and anger can be found in popular cultural genres. Ziad Fahmy has argued that ‘recorded colloquial music, vaudeville, azjal, and the popular press’ were ‘the most effective tools for the dissemination of nationalist ideas to the majority of Egyptians’ (Fahmy 2011: xii).