March 2, 2021 at 10:49 am
The political division in modern Egypt is nothing new. It has its roots in the national movement which grew from the 1919 revolution, or even before it. The division intensified between the National Party founded by Mustafa Kamel and the Wafd Party, in terms of the methodology used to confront the British occupation and interaction with the political process, to the point where students affiliated with the National Party attempted to assassinate Wafd leader Saad Zaghloul, an incident that he did not discuss in his memoirs. It was possibly among their 100 missing pages.
Nevertheless, that attempt tells us that the use of assassination as a political tool was not invented by the Islamists, as the Sisi regime in Egypt has claimed. It preceded the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, as the National Party used it to try to liquidate British officers, as well as national leaders such as Zaghloul. Among the political groups exiled during the period of the British occupation, the political division reached the point where accusations of treason were traded, cooperation with the British was common and opponents were spied on abroad. This is similar to what happens today to the opposition in exile since the 2013 military coup.