Sean Rocha

Portrait of Saad Zaghloul, leader of Egypt’s 1919 revolution

I found this portrait of the early Egyptian nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul in 1997, hidden away in a furniture and antiques store in the Khan el-Khalili souk in Cairo.  The water-stained and inexpensively printed portrait was not intended for sale: it was being used to fill a gap between the back and glass of a much larger picture frame.  In 1919, Zaghloul led Egypt’s only successful popular revolution in modern times, which resulted in Egypt’s independence from British rule in 1922 and a brief stint for Zaghloul as the country’s first elected prime minister.  Today, though there are streets and squares in Cairo named for Saad Zaghloul (and a street in Alexandria named for his wife, Safiyya) his photograph is rarely seen in Egypt; perhaps this is because ongoing collusion between the British and the Egyptian king meant the independence Zaghloul won was largely an illusion.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 2:01 am. It is filed under Found Object and tagged with Cairo, Egypt, Middle East, North Africa, photography, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.