On 18 March 1892 a small public meeting gathered outside Muharram Bey Gate in Alexandria to mark the anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune. Speeches were delivered and songs sung to commemorate the dramatic events of more than twenty years before, while a manifesto of Bakunin proclaiming the principles of anarchism was posted on the walls of the city. The occasion marked the revival of a movement that first appeared in Egypt in the 1860s and sustained a record of continual – if at times uneven – activism into the 1890s and beyond. Internationalist in perspective and united in their opposition to the state, religion and capitalism, anarchists began to engage more explicitly with local Egyptian issues during the 1890s as they took part in the efflorescence of political contest and social agitation of this critical decade. In pursuit of the emancipation of the individual, social justice, workers’ rights and secularism, they played an important part in the contemporary debate on working conditions, education and public health in Egypt. The contribution, even presence, of this movement has been little recognised in the scholarly literature dominated by the competing nationalist and colonialist discourses. However, its particular significance during this critical period lies in the challenge the movement mounted in both word and deed to state power, capitalism and the social establishment that both enriched the public debate and provoked the attention of the security organs of state.

Internationalist Beginnings

Anarchists are first attested in Egypt within Italian working class circles in the 1860s. Their appearance was part of a wider international phenomenon of radicalism calling for the defence of workers’ interests that was formalised with the establishment of the First International (International Workingmen's Association) in London in 1864. By 1876, support for the movement in Egypt was sufficient to sustain the formation of local sections of the International in Cairo, Alexandria and in the cities of the Canal, and their representation at socialist congresses in Europe in the late 1870s. The fragmentation and dissolution of the International during this decade, both the result of state repression and the ideological differences between anarchists under Bakunin's leadership on the one hand and the legalitarian socialists led by Marx and Engels on the other, dealt a setback to the movement.