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[Catalog essay for thr Sony Gallery Show
"King Fouad At Work and Play"
November 12, 2001-January 24, 2002]
This selection of black and white photographs is taken from the vast collection
of Mohamed El Ghazouly, court photographer during the reign of King Fouad.
He was associated with Hanselman, who was the great genius of court photography
at the time according to Barry Iverson and very much the favorite, particularly
in the late 1920s.
El Ghazouly was born in 1901, and graduated from law school but gravitated
to journalism and photography, working first at Al Muqatam magazine and
then as director of photography for Al Ahram. El Ghazouly acquired his
collection from news agencies while he was editor of Kul Shay magazine.
El Ghazoulys collection is now in the possession of his son, Samir El
Ghazouly, who is the editor of the Zakirat al Camera section in Al Ahram
El Riyady magazine.
King Fouad was the first ruler of modern independent Egypt. During his
reign (1917-1936) as the ninth sovereign of the line of Mohamed Ali, Egypt
changed from its brief status as a sultanate under a British protectorate
(and its earlier status, prior to World War I, as a khedivial state nominally
subservient to the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul) to become a full-fledged
and independent kingdom.
Dr. Maged Farag, the publisher who lectures frequently on modern Egyptian
history, observes that when in 1923 King Fouad gave Egypt its first modern
constitution, modern rulership in Egypt was for the first time bound by
the limits of constitutional monarchy.
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Mohamed Ali and Ismail were strongly authoritarian rulers, due to the
fact that a modern Egypt was being built up from scratch and there was
no room for democracy at the time. As for King Fouad, despite his forceful
nature, he was committed to constitutional rule based on democratic principles.
This was true even in those occasional trying times when he was attempting
to violate his own constitution and could not do so because of the very
rules of the political game that he had instituted. Those rules prevailed.
Most historians including Dr. Maged share the assessment of King Fouad
as intelligent, cunning, and well-educated. Unfortunately his son, Farouk,
could not follow in his footsteps, says Dr. Maged. If he had, life in
Egypt today would be very different.
Even before taking the throne (which he did on October 9, 1917, succeeding
his brother Sultan Hussein I) he devoted himself to the task of establishing
a national university in Egypt. In 1908 the Egyptian University was established
with Prince Fouad as its first president-rector. After his death it would
be renamed Fouad University in his honor.
First as a prince and then as king, Fouad encouraged and patronized the
revival of the Royal Geographical Society of Egypt, founded the Institute
of Hydrobiology and the Society of Political Economy, Statistics and Legislation,
and was involved in the revival and reorganization of the Institut dEgypte
and the founding of the Institute of Oriental Music and the Arabic Academy
of Letters, to mention but a few of the scientific and educational societies
and institutes that he took an interest in helping to establish.
King Fouad would recover much of the prestige denied to Mohamed Ali and
Ismail by the great powers. It was during his reign, having secured political
independence and the end of the protectorate in 1922, that King Fouad
began negotiations for the withdrawal of British forces, a negotiating
process that took years but which resulted in the 1936 Anglo?Egyptian
Treaty signed shortly after his death, and the evacuation of British forces
from Egypt except for the Canal Zone.
These were the golden years of the 20th-century monarchy.
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